Argilla Raises $1.6M in Seed Funding to Drive NLP Growth with the Most Advanced Data-Centric Labeling Platform

• Leading AI VCs, Zetta Venture Partners and Caixa Capital Risc co-led the investment.

• New capital to be used to develop the first data-centric open-source labeling platform – currently thousands of users across the United States, India, Europe, South America and Asia.

• Argilla enables companies to build robust NLP products through faster labeling and data curation with the easiest-to-use programmatic and human-in-the-loop labeling capabilities.

MADRID and SAN FRANCISCO, January 25, 2023 /PRNewswire/ — claymaker of the first platform that enables enterprises to build production-ready natural language processing (NLP) solutions with a single, data-centric labeling platform, announced today $1.6 million in seed funding. The round was co-led by leading venture capital firm exclusively focused on AI investment, Zetta Venture Partners, and Spanish deeptech venture capital focused on data infrastructure and development tools, Caixa Capital Risk.

NLP is a well-known artificial intelligence component widely used in consumer digital assistants and chatbots, as well as business applications such as sentiment analysis, text analysis, and speech analysis. Enterprise adoption of NLP technologies has continued to grow due to more affordable and scalable options, increased data processing capacity and digitization, and the convergence of NLP with machine learning. in depth (DL) and machine learning (ML). As ML models become more powerful, standard, and accessible through open-source hubs like Hugging Face, high-quality training data has become the single most important factor for companies to successfully implement NLP technologies.

“A recent to study by Meta and UCL London found that adding some sample high quality training data is Following beneficial to model quality than increasing the model size by billions of parameters since increasing the model size has a huge impact on the computational cost,” said Francois Aranda, co-founder of Argilla. “As a result, we are seeing a shift from model-centric AI to data-centric AI or, to put it another way, a shift from amount of data to data quality.”

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To address this problem, the co-founders of Argilla, Daniel Vila Suerodoctorate and Francois Aranda, has developed the first data-centric NLP platform for data and ML teams to create and monitor high-quality training data at a fraction of the time and cost of alternative tools. Companies can use Argilla to engage domain experts in their NLP lifecycle, which improves data quality and allows them to use the most sophisticated programmatic labeling methods from academia, which also reduces costs labeling. Argilla is a powerful alternative to manually labeling thousands of training examples.

“Teaching an ML model continues to be a tedious process, data labeling remains a huge challenge and hurdle as it is slow, expensive and labor-intensive,” Roma said. Jelinskaite, Investment Director at Caixa Capital Risc. “We believe Argilla will play a key role in the NLP ecosystem by finally removing the trade-off between accuracy and efficiency.”

Argilla’s Data-Centric Labeling Platform

Argilla is the first open-source, data-centric labeling platform to offer the most sophisticated labeling practices while being simple enough to integrate with other NLP and MLOps tools. The platform allows teams to involve business profiles in the process, ensuring models meet all business requirements. By making it easy to adapt pre-trained models to specific use cases, Argilla helps companies get the most out of their NLP solutions.

Other key benefits include:

• Reduces time and increases quality: Companies can reduce production time and improve model quality without the need for extensive manual labeling.

• Unlock data value: Argilla makes it easy to build and deploy high-quality NLP models and unlock the value of data.

• For data teams: Argilla simplifies the process of creating complex human workflows, integrates them into an existing stack, and improves models over time. It also allows teams to fine-tune any pre-trained language model to meet their specific business needs.

• For business and domain experts: Argilla makes it easy to contribute to data and model quality without requiring programming skills and hundreds of hours of manual labeling and review.

“Dani, Francis and the Argilla team helped pioneer the new data-centric approach to enterprise NLP. most sophisticated human in the loop has been recognized by thousands of open source and enterprise users leveraging Argilla to drive value from NLP across their organization,” said James Alcorn, partner at Zetta Venture Partners. “Zetta is thrilled to partner with Dani, Francis and leading Spanish VC, Caixa Capital Risc, to help Argilla execute its next phase of growth.”

“We are thrilled to have the support and guidance of two leading venture capital firms who are investing in cutting-edge technologies and are equally excited about the opportunities Argilla offers the NLP industry,” Vila said. Suero. “We know that global technology leaders are looking for better solutions as their NLP budgets increase. Since 2020, 60% have increased by 10%, 33% indicated that it has increased by at least 30 % and 15% said it more than doubled.. We continue to invest in our platform with the sole purpose of enabling companies to build robust NLP products through faster labeling and data retention. and with the easiest to use programmatic and human tagging features.”

Argilla already has thousands of users across the United States, India, Europe, South America, Africaand Asia. Current clients include Reale Seguros (Italy), Airbus (Germany), and Red Electrica de España, Idealista (Spain).

Argilla’s cloud offering (currently in alpha) will be available in the US and globally in Q1 2023.

Learn more about Argilla and request a demo visit argilla.io.

About Argille:
clay is the creator of the first platform that enables enterprises to build production-ready natural language processing (NLP) solutions with a single, data-centric labeling platform. Argilla enables companies to build robust NLP products through faster labeling and data curation with the easiest-to-use programmatic and human-in-the-loop labeling capabilities. The company was founded in 2017 in Madrid, Spain by the co-founders Daniel Vila Suerodoctorate (IA) and Francois Aranda. To find out more or to request a demo visit argilla.io.

About Zetta Venture Partners:
Zetta Venture Partners is the first venture capital firm focused exclusively on investing in AI. Founded in 2013, the first year a zettabyte of data crossed the internet, the company manages $365 million of assets in three funds. Each member of Zetta’s management team has extensive experience as an entrepreneur, operator and investor. The San FranciscoLondon-based firm leads investment rounds in AI-driven, pre-traction ventures with B2B business models, including Kagglé, Dom, Domino Data Lab,and Docile. Visit www.zettavp.com for more information.

About Caixa Capital Risk:
Caixa Capital Risk (CCR) is a multi-stage venture capital fund based in Spain which invests in early-stage and growth-stage SaaS and Deep Tech companies, with a particular focus on DevOps, infrastructure, data and cybersecurity. CCR currently manages +€200m and is part of the investment organization CriteriaCaixalargest investment holding company in Spain with 30 billion euros in assets. CCR has been investing since 2007 and portfolio companies have gone public or been acquired by blue chip companies like Apple, Meta, AirBnB, Qiagen, Vente-Privée, Pernod Ricard, Repsol and the like.

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SOURCE Clay