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Thanks to a new investment from Caisse de dépôt et placement du Québec (CDPQ), San Francisco’s Sama plans to grow its headcount in Montréal to 300 employees by 2023.
The artificial intelligence (AI) training data firm just raised a USD $70 million Series B funding round led CDPQ with participation from First Ascent Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, Vistara Growth, in addition to all existing investors.
Sama powers cutting-edge technology by providing industry-leading training data quality for its clients, achieving up to 99.9% accuracy versus the industry average of 94%.
To date, Sama agents have annotated over one billion image points on the platform, with an average of one million tasks completed per month across industries such as manufacturing and robotics, bio and MedTech, autonomous vehicles and entertainment. The high-quality data provided by Sama allows its customers to accelerate the commercialization of their technology.
Sama currently has about 45 employees in Montréal and, according to BetaKit, plans to grow its headcount in Montréal to 300 employees by 2023 to support its platform development goals.
“Sama has successfully captured the rising demand for fast, accurate and cost-effective AI training solutions to power machine learning algorithms as a result of the growing adoption of AI. It succeeded in building a strong pipeline of blue-chip clients while advocating for an ethical AI supply chain that contributes to fighting poverty and increasing women’s representation in the sector,” said Wils Theagene, Senior Director, Québec at CDPQ and representative of the Equity 253 fund.
“Sama is a high-tech company with a global footprint, including in Canada where it relies on a massive pool of machine learning talent. We look forward to supporting Sama in developing a research and product development hub in Montreal, which will help them commercialize new AI-based solutions to support their Fortune 2000 clients.”
Photo by Walid Amghar on Unsplash