The company has raised $8.5 million in a new Series Seed round to expand its unique, high-quality human feedback platform, enabling faster model iteration and deployment at a fraction of the cost

Rapidata, a company that accelerates AI development through scalable, on-demand data labeling via digital ads, today announced an $8.5 million seed round co-led by Canaan Partners and IA Ventures with participation from Acequia Capital and BlueYard. The AI infrastructure and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) startup is tackling one of AI’s biggest bottlenecks: the slow, manual process of collecting large-scale human feedback to train and improve models. Its technology delivers fast, global, on-demand human data, cutting timelines from weeks to hours. 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.

“Human feedback has become the limiting factor in AI progress,” said Jason Corkill, CEO and founder of Rapidata. “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.”

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. This dramatically shortens development timelines and allows teams to iterate on models in near-real-time.

“Rapidata helps us test our voice models with real users in real contexts worldwide—in days, not months,” said Lily Clifford, CEO, Rime. “Previously, gathering meaningful feedback meant cobbling together vendors and surveys, segment by segment, or country by country, which didn’t scale. Now we can quickly reach the right audiences and see how our models perform in real customer workflows and not just in isolated tests. This faster, higher-quality feedback through Rapidata has accelerated our iteration and helped fuel our rapid growth.”

"The output of our foundation model for human motion needs to be of high quality and feel real. Rapidata not only helps us evaluate the model at scale, but also informs inputs into the model, that help us remain best in class”, said Viren Tellis, CEO, Uthana. “Once we started iterating on our model we quickly ran into the limits of internal or overseas human evaluation. With Rapidata we do not run in to the risk of stalling our growth”

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.

“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.”

About Rapidata

Rapidata is an AI infrastructure company that enables AI teams to quickly and cost-effectively collect large volumes of high-quality human feedback. Using crowd intelligence and a global network of human participants, Rapidata dramatically reduces the time and cost required to label, validate, and refine datasets used to train and evaluate AI models. By compressing feedback cycles from months into days, Rapidata helps AI companies iterate faster, bring products to market sooner, and scale human intelligence alongside modern AI systems. To learn more, visit rapidata.ai

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Rapidata has raised $8.5M to eliminate one of AI’s biggest bottlenecks: human feedback. The platform enables fast, global, on-demand feedback, helping AI teams iterate faster and bring models to market sooner.