Sapien raises $5 million for data labeling with AI applications

Sapien has raised $5 million in a seed-funding round to accelerate its data labeling business. 

The round featured contributions from investors such as Primitive Ventures, Animoca, Ravikant Capital and Yield Guild Games. Sapien will use the funds to enhance its AI to better guide and assist its data labeling, the company says. The money will also go toward expanding Sapien’s blockchain infrastructure to build out its team of human labelers.

“This funding will allow us to expand our team, expand our frontend labeling infrastructure and provide better quality data for our growing list of enterprise customers,” Sapien co-founder Trevor Koverko said Wednesday in a statement. 

Sapien uses rewards on the blockchain to essentially gamify data labeling, a process integral to advancing AI-powered language learning models like OpenAI’s Chat GPT. Data labeling involves tagging text, images, and various types of files with labels, enabling machine-learning models to interpret and learn from the data.

The data labeling market reached a valuation of $6.8 billion in 2021 and is expected to soar to nearly $75 billion by 2032, according to data labeler Fact.MR. Meanwhile, Statista's data shows that the broader artificial intelligence market is projected to grow to $738 billion in 2029, up from a valuation of roughly $242 billion last year.