Physical AI data infrastructure startup Encord has secured $60 million in new funding. The Series C round, led by Wellington Management, aims to transition robots, drones, and other autonomous physical AI systems from lab environments to real-world production.
Encord's automated data development platform streamlines the preparation of data crucial for training physical AI models. It manages data, facilitates curation, aids model evaluation, and automates annotation, creating an auditable trail for developers to refine model outputs and achieve better outcomes.
The funding comes as the physical AI industry nears a significant inflection point, with thousands of intelligent robots and autonomous vehicles set to come online globally. Projections estimate over 400 million intelligent robots will launch in the next four years, driving the physical AI market beyond $30 billion annually.
Encord's platform is designed to handle complex multimodal data streams from robots and autonomous systems, including audio, video, sensor data, and 3D point clouds. This is critical as physical AI models require vast amounts of proprietary, real-world data, often more complex and computationally intensive to process than standard large language model data.
Co-founder Ulrik Stig Hansen emphasized that data readiness, not just model size, is the primary bottleneck in physical AI. "You can have the most sophisticated model in the world, but it will still fail if the data feeding it is incomplete, inconsistent and misaligned with real-world conditions," he stated.
Since its previous funding round, Encord has seen substantial growth, with data volume on its platform increasing from over 1 petabyte to more than 5 petabytes. Revenue has also surged more than tenfold.
Serving over 300 physical AI teams globally, Encord's clients include Toyota Motor Co.'s Woven and drone developers Zipline and Skydio. These customers utilize the platform for the entire model development lifecycle, from pretraining data generation to aligning models with human feedback post-deployment.
The new capital will fuel Encord's expansion into new markets and accelerate platform development, reinforcing its role in building the essential infrastructure for usable and continuously improving physical AI systems.