Snorkel AI Raises $350 Million at $3.5 Billion Valuation

Summary

Snorkel AI has raised $350 million in a Series E round led by Insight Partners and S32, valuing the seven-year-old company at $3.5 billion. That is nearly three times the $1.3 billion valuation it received when it raised $100 million in its Series D 17 months earlier. Existing backers including Addition, Lightspeed, Greylock, GV, and Wells Fargo also joined the round. Snorkel began with software that automated data labeling but shifted last year toward selling completed datasets as a data-as-a-service offering. Its model combines software and AI models that generate synthetic data with work from subject-matter experts, and the company also sells reinforcement-learning environments. Snorkel says its annualized revenue run rate has reached $375 million, an eighteenfold increase over the past 12 months, driven by AI labs’ demand for high-end training data. The article compares this growth with reported gross annualized revenue at other AI data companies, while noting that companies paying 60% to 70% of top-line revenue to specialists have substantially lower net revenue. Snorkel says expert payments are recorded as cost of goods sold because it sells datasets and RL environments rather than human labor. The company launched commercially in 2019 after four years of research by co-founder and CEO Alex Ratner’s Stanford AI lab team.