Rapidata, an AI infrastructure company delivering scalable on-demand human data through digital ad distribution, announced an $8.5 million seed round co-led by Canaan Partners and IA Ventures, with participation from Acequia Capital and BlueYard. The company addresses a core AI bottleneck: slow, manual collection of large-scale human feedback for model training and reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF). Funding will expand Rapidata’s global human data network and meet rising demand for faster, higher-quality model validation and iteration.
Removing the Human Feedback Bottleneck
“Human feedback has become the limiting factor in AI progress. Rapidata removes that ceiling by making human judgment available at a global scale and near real time, unlocking a future where AI teams can run constant feedback loops and build systems that evolve every day instead of every release cycle. At this speed of iteration, entirely new AI innovation becomes possible.”— Jason Corkill, CEO and Founder of Rapidata
From Weeks to Hours in Model Iteration
While compute and model architectures have advanced rapidly, collecting reliable human judgments remains time-intensive and operationally complex. Traditional feedback cycles can take weeks or months, slowing product improvements. Rapidata enables AI teams to access a continuously available global network, reducing feedback timelines from months to days or even hours, supporting near real-time iteration.
Integrated Global Human Data Network
The platform integrates directly into AI development workflows, distributing short, opt-in tasks through widely used consumer applications and reaching tens of millions of users daily. Trust and expertise profiling match tasks to relevant respondents, delivering high-quality data without the complexity of managing annotation teams.