AI and deep learning are no longer just promising technologies on the horizon—they’re transforming the global economy at a breathtaking pace. 

Let’s break it down:

  • Manufacturing is getting smarter, with AI optimizing production lines
  • Agriculture is seeing a tech boom as deep learning helps maximize crop yields
  • Transportation is on the cusp of a revolution with self-driving vehicles
  • Security systems are becoming predictive, not just reactive
  • Healthcare is evolving rapidly, with AI drastically reducing time and errors associated with manual analysis and annotation

But if you want to see where AI is really flexing its muscles, look no further than computer vision. Remember when beating humans at image recognition was headline news? Now, it’s just another Tuesday. AI models are acing these tasks left and right, setting new standards with every passing month.

We’re witnessing a pivotal moment in tech history, and the implications are huge. But for an AI model to be successful, it must be built on high-quality data. As companies and executives seek to incorporate AI into their businesses, many are discovering that their data is siloed, uncurated, and unprepared, causing a major roadblock to AI adoption. As more and more companies integrate AI into their offerings, more and more are discovering the dearth of well-curated, high-quality data and the lack of domain experts to prepare it.

Enter: Encord

Today, we are excited to announce that we are leading a $30M Series B investment in Encord, the AI data development platform for advanced vision and multimodal teams founded by Eric Landau and Ulrik Stig Hansen.

While legacy methods rely on thousands of people to prepare training datasets for AI use, Encord uses automation to equip AI teams with the resources they need to make large datasets AI-ready and get models to production faster. 

Eric and Ulrik’s inspiration for building Encord was based on their own experience deploying countless ML models. During this time, they realized that this legacy method was broken and that AI data development must be both accelerated and multimodal. This realization built the foundation of Encord, which was developed with vision at its core, a modality more complex than text. This strategic focus positions the company to lead in the upcoming multimodal era, surpassing competitors who are currently fixated on the hype surrounding LLMs. 

With Encord able to manage data for AI models based on images, videos, medical imagery, visual language, voice, and more, we know this new automated approach to data development will broaden the impact of emergent multimodal models (such as GPT-4o, Llama 3.1, etc.). It also drives the kind of customer delight that can be the basis for long-term competitive differentiation. Encord’s laser focus on its customers is a key reason we are excited about its future.

The AI Data Development Platform

Encord’s suite of products is designed to address the most pressing challenges in vision and multimodal AI development:

  • Encord Index, announced today, tackles the data management headache head-on. No more lost files or disorganized datasets – just clean, accessible data ready when you need it.
  • Encord Annotate transforms data labeling from a bottleneck into a streamlined process. We’ve seen teams using Encord cut their annotation time—and cost—in half, freeing up resources for innovation and growth.
  • Encord Active is where theory meets practice. It helps teams quantify and improve model performance in the real world, not just in the lab.

Encord’s approach has allowed top AI teams at leading organizations to build custom automated data development pipelines and workflows, dramatically reducing the time and cost of developing their models. From improving product quality control on factory floors to enhancing security in public spaces, these tools make a difference.

Encord’s success in a competitive market underscores the pressing need for scalable data management and preparation solutions in AI development. We’re excited to support this next phase of growth.

In a world increasingly shaped by rapid AI development, Encord ensures that the power to create and refine new capabilities is in more hands than ever before. This isn’t just an investment in a company; it’s an investment in a more connected, efficient, and innovative future.