Rapidata raised USD 8.5 million to eliminate the feedback bottleneck in AI development

As AI development accelerates, access to timely human feedback has emerged as a critical bottleneck. While compute and model architectures have advanced rapidly, collecting high-quality human judgments, preferences, and validation data remains slow, expensive, and operationally complex. Traditional approaches often require weeks or months to complete a single feedback cycle, delaying model improvements and limiting how quickly teams can iterate.

Rapidata solves this problem by enabling AI companies to gather massive volumes of feedback from people at unprecedented speed and scale. Instead of relying on static annotation workforces or limited labeling pools, Rapidata gives AI teams access to a continuously available global network of people, enabling feedback cycles that once took months to complete to be completed in days or even within a single day.

Rapidata integrates directly into existing AI development workflows and enables customers to request targeted human feedback on demand. The platform distributes short, opt-in tasks through widely used consumer applications, reaching tens of millions of users globally daily without disrupting their experience. Over time, Rapidata builds trust and expertise profiles that match questions with the most relevant respondents, delivering high-quality data at scale without the overhead of managing custom annotation operations.

The Zurich-based start-up closed an $8.5 million seed round co-led by Canaan Partners and IA Ventures with participation from Acequia Capital and BlueYard. The funding will be used to scale Rapidata’s global human data network and support growing demand from AI companies that need faster, more reliable feedback to train, validate, and improve their models in an increasingly competitive market.

“Jason Corkill is one of the greatest founders I’ve encountered in my career. Every serious AI deployment depends on human judgment somewhere in the lifecycle,” said Jared Newman, who led the investment at Canaan Partners. “As models move from expertise-based tasks to taste-based curation, the demand for scalable human feedback will grow dramatically. Rapidata is positioned to serve a market that spans foundation models, enterprise AI, and the next generation of AI-driven products.”

(Press release / SK)
Photo: Rapidata Team L-R: Luca Strebel (Chief Architect), Mads Alber (CIO), Jason Corkill (CEO), and Marian Kannwischer (CTO)