SAMASOURCE RAISES $14.8M, For Its Business & AI!

SAMASOURCE RAISES $14.8M SERIES A FUNDING TO FURTHER SCALE BUSINESS AND AI POTENTIALS

The AI data training provider Samasource raises $14.8M Series A funding round led by Bestseller Foundation, Ridge Ventures, Social Impact Ventures, and not excluding Bluecrest Limited Capital which also joined the funding round.

This came as Samasource with headquarter in San Francisco delivered Fortune 100 companies all from the resource needed for engineering in the field of communication, autonomous transportation, e-commerce, and media via its data specialists, a large number located in East Africa.  However, the Series A funds will be used to enhance the organization’s engineering, sales, and marketing efforts.

The funds will practically help to expand Samasource’s technology with more advanced features in its platform, which include building upon current annotation automation potentials that will enhance efficiency and quality, coupled with more advanced integration with customer’s machine learning models through API. This will further establish the company as a pioneer in the area of data training and Artificial Intelligence, and to continue to deliver secure and high-quality training data to 20% of Fortune companies such as Walmart, Microsoft, and Continental.

Responding to this development, the CEO and founder of Samasource ‘Leila Janah’ said: “To receive the funding support of Ridge Ventures has allowed us to accelerate growth beyond our expectations, AI is growing at breakneck speed, and we know the biggest bottleneck is secure, high-quality training data. Our emphasis on investments in technology and talent will deepen our level of service to AI teams at the world’s leading tech and automotive companies”. – Credit: Cision

With Samasource raising $14.8M, the company plans to enhance the features of its platform, and also in the process opened an Artificial Development Center in Canada, Montreal coupled with the expansion of its digital training center in Uganda and Kampala to ascertain the service of the corporate client base. More so, in addition to its global presence in New York City, San Francisco, the Hague, Gulu, and Nairobi. In a bid to further build out its engineering department, ‘Frederic Ratle’ joining the team as head of AI R&D (research and development).    

According to history, Samasource was originally founded by ‘Janah’ in 2008, as a nonprofit organization with the aim of tapping into the incredible depth of East African talents, which eventually became a profit firm this year 2019, and in the process made the previous nonprofit entity a shareholder.

‘Leila Janah’ in her response of converting the firm to a private company made it clear that, “As a CEO I need to make it clear to investors that this is an investing entity”.

In another development, the principal at Ridge Ventures ‘Ben Metcalfe’ said: “One of the biggest drivers of AI model value is the quality of the labeling and tagging of the corpus of training data. While many in the industry use casual, untrained gig-economy labor with poor results, I was excited to see the quality, security and high throughput Samasource achieves for its clients. It’s no surprise that so many leaders in the AI and Machine Leading space rely on the company for its best-in-class data labeling services to help build their world-changing models. As Samasource continues to combine software intelligence with their inspiring workforce, I’m honored to partner with them to bring forth the next AI-powered industrial revolution”.

• What’s your take as Samasource raises $14.8M Series A?