Samasource raises $14.8M for global AI data biz driven from Africa
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Samasource raises $14.8M for global AI data biz driven from Africa
AI training data provider Samasource has raised a $14.8 million Series A funding round led by Ridge Ventures.
The San Francisco headquartered company delivers Fortune 100 companies with the inputs they need for machine learning development in fields including autonomous transportation, e-commerce and robotics.
And it does so with a global work-force of data-specialists, a large number of whom are located in East Africa.
In addition to San Francisco, New York and the Hague, Samasource has offices and teams in Kenya and Uganda. The company has a global staff of 2900 and is the largest AI and data annotation employer in East Africa, according to CEO and founder Leila Janah.
As part of its Series A, Samasource opened an AI Development Center in Montreal, Canada and expanded its digital delivery center in Kampala, Uganda to serve its corporate client-base.
"Typically we're working with very large companies for whom AI is a key part of their business strategy. So therefore they have to be really careful about…bias in the algorithms or bad data," Janah explained on a call with TechCrunch.
Samasource works through a discovery phase with customers, to determine the problems their trying to solve, their sources of input data, and customizes an approach to providing what they need.
"In some cases we might refine elements of our software…then we go into deployment and…annotation work," said Janah, referring to the company's SamaHub training data platform.
Samasource clients include Google, Continental Tires, Walmart, and Ford. The company generates revenue primarily through its machine learning data annotation and validation services.
Samasource was originally founded by Janah as a n