Led by Redpoint Ventures, the funding will enable the company to scale operations to meet the growing demand for data-centric technologies, enabling organizations to build the most accurate, competitive, and differentiated AI/ML models possible
Heartex, the company behind the leading open source data labeling platform Label Studio, announced it has raised $25 million in Series A funding, bringing the company’s total raised to $30 million. Redpoint Ventures led the round, with participation from existing investors, including Unusual Ventures, Bow Capital, Swift Ventures and some notable angel investors. Satish Dharmaraj, managing director at Redpoint Ventures, has also joined the board. The new funding will be used to further develop its flagship product – data labeling platform Label Studio – in areas such as labeling automation, bias detection and mitigation, and additional quality management and analytics capabilities.
Data with Meaning Delivers Better Business Outcomes
While the amount of data flowing through businesses has increased dramatically, the majority of data science and AI initiatives chartered to extract value from this data have failed to deliver the desired outcome. In fact, Gartner’s research shows that only one in five analytical insights leads to business outcomes.
Despite challenges, the AI community has persevered and evolved, giving rise to the data-centric era of AI development. Data science teams, having learned valuable lessons about the connection between training data quality and production model performance, are now establishing internal practices to manage data annotation and quality.
“While every organization has unstructured data, it is extremely difficult to build the necessary systems and processes to give that data meaning or context so that it fuels predictive power. We created Heartex to simplify the effort required to generate quality training data for any AI use case, ” said Michael Malyuk, CEO and Co-Founder at Heartex. “We are thrilled to have Satish and Redpoint Ventures join our team as we take the next step in accomplishing our mission of improving AI outcomes for every organization by improving data quality through data labeling and harnessing the data-centric approach to AI.”
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Heartex’s Label Studio: Open Source At Its Core
Heartex’s open source Label Studio edition supports a wide range of AI use cases, including NLP, Computer Vision, Audio, Time-Series, Multi-Domain, and more. Customers leverage Label Studio’s unique programmable interface to customize workflows and the interface for each specific dataset. With over 100,000 software installs and the largest community of data-centric AI, ML, and Data Science professionals (4,000+ members and counting), Label Studio has quickly become the most popular open source project of its kind.
“Open source is the cornerstone of product quality and supremacy,” said Dharmaraj. “The open source community is now seeing tremendous growth and enterprise adoption by leading brands. I am thrilled to be joining the Heartex board to support the team in accomplishing their mission.”
Label Studio customers, having improved the quality of their training data, increased production model accuracy to such a degree that projects were finally accomplishing their expected business outcomes. In 2021, Heartex released Label Studio Enterprise to meet demand as customers scaled their data-centric AI development, specifically data labeling operations. Heartex Label Studio Enterprise includes expanded operational, quality management, reporting, analytics, and security capabilities required by organizations ready to scale their AI and data science investments.
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“We’ve been incredibly impressed by Michael and the Heartex team’s commitment and passion in bringing AI-powered automation to every data labeling project,” said John Vrionis, Managing Partner of Unusual Ventures. “Having worked in-depth alongside the team since leading their seed investment, we’ve been awed by their vision and dedication, not just in building Label Studio but in building a world-class community of peers focused on making automation available and simple for data labeling. Welcome Satish and Redpoint Ventures to the team, we couldn’t be more excited to have you on this journey.”