Seoul-based Datumo raises $15.5M to tackle Scale AI, backed by Salesforce

Most organizations say they aren’t absolutely ready to make use of generative AI in a protected and accountable approach, according to a recent McKinsey report. One concern is explainability – understanding how and why AI makes sure selections. Whereas 40% of respondents view it as a major threat, solely 17% are actively addressing it, per the report.

Seoul-based Datumo started as an AI information labeling firm and now needs to assist companies construct safer AI with instruments and information that allow testing, monitoring, and enhancing their fashions—with out requiring technical experience. On Monday the startup raised $15.5 million, which brings its complete raised to roughly $28 million, from buyers together with Salesforce Ventures, KB Funding, and SBI Funding, amongst others.

David Kim, CEO of Datumo and a former AI researcher at Korea’s Company for Defence Growth, was annoyed by the time-consuming nature of knowledge labeling so he got here up with a brand new concept: a reward-based app that lets anybody label information of their spare time and earn cash. The startup validated the concept at a startup competitors at KAIST (Korea Superior Institute of Science and Know-how). Kim co-founded Datumo, previously generally known as SelectStar, alongside 5 KAIST alumni in 2018.

Even earlier than the app was absolutely constructed, Datumo secured tens of 1000’s of {dollars} in pre-contract gross sales through the buyer discovery part of the competitors, largely from KAIST alumni-led companies and startups.

In its first 12 months, the startup surpassed $1 million in income and secured a number of key contracts. As we speak, the startup counts main Korean firms like Samsung, Samsung SDS, LG Electronics, LG CNS, Hyundai, Naver, and Seoul-based telecom large SK Telecom amongst its purchasers. A number of years in the past, nevertheless, purchasers started asking the corporate to transcend easy information labeling. The seven-year-old startup now has greater than 300 purchasers in South Korea and generated about $6 million in income in 2024.

“They needed us to attain their AI mannequin outputs or examine them to different outputs,” Michael Hwang, co-founder of Datumo, instructed TechCrunch. “That’s after we realized: we had been already doing AI mannequin analysis — with out even understanding it.” Datumo doubled down on this space and launched Korea’s first benchmark dataset centered on AI belief and security, Hwang added.

“We began in information annotation, then expanded into pretraining datasets and analysis because the LLM ecosystem matured,” Kim instructed TechCrunch.

Meta’s recent $14.3 billion acquisition-like investment in data-labeling company Scale AI highlights the significance of this market. Shortly after that deal, AI mannequin maker and Meta competitor OpenAI stopped using Scale AI’s services. The Meta deal additionally indicators that competitors for AI coaching information is intensifying.

Datumo shares some similarities with firms like Scale AI in pretraining dataset provisioning, and with Galileo and Arize AI in AI analysis and monitoring. Nonetheless, it differentiates itself by way of its licensed datasets, significantly information crawled from revealed books, which the corporate says presents wealthy structured human reasoning however is notoriously tough to scrub, based on CEO Kim.

In contrast to its friends, Datumo additionally presents a full-stack analysis platform known as Datumo Eval, which robotically generates take a look at information and evaluations to test for unsafe, biased or incorrect responses with out the necessity for handbook scripting, Kim added. The signature product is a no-code analysis software designed for non-developers like these on coverage, belief and security, and compliance groups.

When requested about attracting buyers like Salesforce Ventures, Kim defined that the startup had beforehand hosted a fireplace chat with Andrew Ng, founding father of DeepLearning.AI, at an occasion in South Korea. After the occasion, Kim shared the session on LinkedIn, which caught the eye of Salesforce Ventures. Following a number of conferences and Zoom calls, the buyers prolonged a tender dedication. The complete funding course of took about eight months, Hwang stated.

The brand new funding shall be used to speed up R&D efforts, significantly in growing automated analysis instruments for enterprise AI, and to scale world go-to-market operations throughout South Korea, Japan, and the U.S. The startup, which has 150 workers in Seoul, additionally established a presence in Silicon Valley in March.