Proximal exits stealth with $15M seed as revenue tops $200M
What's the deal? ProximalDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, a San Francisco-based coding data startup, has raised $15 million in seed funding led by General Catalyst at a $300 million valuation. The company emerged from stealth to announce the round, which it closed at the end of last year.
What does it do? Proximal supplies data used to improve AI models, focusing on software engineering. It joins a crowded field of data labeling and curation startups, including established players like Scale and Surge and newer entrants such as Fleet and Micro1.
The numbers: When it raised the round, Proximal was generating negligible revenue, co-founder and chief executive officer Calvin Chen said. Ten months on, the 40-person company has surpassed $200 million in annualised revenue — a figure it calculates by multiplying revenue in the quarter so far by four.
Why now? Leading AI developers are competing for data to sharpen their models, especially in lucrative areas like coding. That demand has lifted a wave of data startups, and Proximal is the latest to benefit.
Chen co-founded the startup last autumn with his roommate Justus Mattern, who previously worked at compute startup Prime Intellect, itself only two years old.
The signal: At $15 million, Proximal's round sits in the 96th percentile of all-time seed rounds in enterprise software, based on a sample of 27,807 deals. The size — paired with a fast revenue ramp — underscores how much capital investors are willing to commit early to companies feeding the AI data supply chain.
Read more: The Information
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