Snorkel AI raises $350M at $3.5B valuation on AI data demand
What's the deal? Snorkel AI has raised $350 million in a late-stage round at US$2.26B valuation, chief executive officer Alex Ratner told Reuters. Insight Partners and S32 co-led, with participation from existing backers AdditionDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, GreylockDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, and Wells FargoDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →.
What does it do? The San Francisco company, founded in 2019 by researchers from the Stanford AI lab, supplies training data and reinforcement-learning environments to AI developers. It has shifted from selling software to delivering finished datasets, pairing human experts with thousands of specialised models on what it calls an "agentic data development platform."
By the numbers: The valuation is nearly triple the $1.3 billion Snorkel reached when it raised $100 million in May 2025. Its annualised revenue run-rate has crossed $350 million, up from roughly $20 million a year earlier, driven by a data-as-a-service business launched in September 2025.
Why now? Ratner said demand has grown as AI labs move beyond simple labelling toward harder, higher-stakes data to train and evaluate more capable systems. Coding data is one of Snorkel's biggest areas of demand, alongside work in law and medicine.
The round sits in the top 5% of all late-stage venture deals for US enterprise software companies by size.
What's the endgame? Snorkel will use the capital to hire researchers and engineers and expand its enterprise and government operations. It also plans to support third-party model evaluations and move into new verticals and data types. The company expects to reach profitability this year.
Snorkel says it works with frontier AI labs, hyperscalers, enterprises, and the US federal government. It taps a network of tens of thousands of specialists and sells the resulting data products rather than charging for human labour, a model Ratner said lets it pay experts more while preserving margins.
The signal: Money keeps flowing to startups feeding frontier labs high-quality training data, a market reshaped by Meta'US$10.5B purchase of a 49% stake in Scale AIDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → in June 2025. Rivals including Mercor and Surge AI have drawn similar investor interest. "Data is becoming more rare, more specialized, more difficult to find," said Andy Harrison, the S32 partner who co-led the round. "If you want to train the most frontier, complex and capable models, now you need superior data."
Read more: srnnews.com
Image credit: Snorkel AI
