Seoul-based Datumo’s pivot from a pure data labelling start-up to AI data training tools has paid off with a $15.5m raise backed by Salesforce Ventures.
At a time when quality of data – or the lack of it – for AI models is much to the fore, Datumo is focused on that area of growing importance that is safety and data evaluation.
According to TechCrunch, the $15.5m raise brings its total investment to date to $28m, with backers including KB Investment, ACVC Partners and SBI Investment, as well as Salesforce Ventures.
Datumo is seen as a potential competitor for the likes of Scale AI, which recently drew a huge $14.3bn investment from Meta as part of the social media giant’s drive to up its AI game. The investment drew plenty of scrutiny as it was suggested they may have overpaid, given plenty of teething problems at the AI start-up, but the move emphasised the perceived value of companies that excel in LLM (large learning models) evaluation tools.
Datumo began life as a data labelling company, SelectStar, when co-founded by its CEO David Kim, a former AI researcher for South Korea’s Agency for Defense Development. It quickly began to add major Korean clients including Samsung and SK Telecom. However, speaking to TechCrunch, co-founder Michael Hwang explained that its customers were asking the start-up to go beyond pure data labelling.
“They wanted us to score their AI model outputs or compare them to other outputs,” said Hwang. “That’s when we realised: We were already doing AI model evaluation – without even knowing it.”
Datumo subsequently released South Korea’s first benchmark dataset focused on AI trust and safety, and today specialises in pretraining datasets and evaluation for LLMs. Today, the 7-year-old start-up has more than 300 clients in South Korea and generated about $6m in revenue in 2024.
The investment will now allow Datumo to speed up the pace of its research and development efforts, and support its ambitions to expand its operations across Japan and South Korea, and indeed the US, where it opened a Silicon Valley office in March of this year. One to watch.
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