A fresh wave of backing hits Encord, with 60 million dollars now flowing in through a Series C round. This boost arrives just as real, world AI moves beyond testing into broad rollout phases. Powering the charge is Wellington Management, stepping forward as lead investor. That lifts the firm’s overall raised amount to 110 million bucks. Previous backers like Y Combinator stayed involved, CRV did too, along with N47, Crane Venture Partners, and Harpoon Ventures. New names joined the mix: Bright Pixel Capital made an entry, Isomer Capital showed up as well. Money lands at a turning point, when machines start acting outside labs.
With fresh funding, Encord can grow its AI, built data system built for handling tough, varied information types used in actual AI applications. Because standard business tools struggle with such complexity, this setup supports teams working across sound, moving pictures, still visuals, sensors, and 3D scans. Through it, users organize, refine, label, and sync massive sets of mixed, format data, something older platforms werent made for. Built around how modern artificial intelligence works, the structure handles inputs that go beyond what typical databases manage well.
Right now, money shows up just as physical AI shifts gears, robotics, self, driving cars, and flying machines moving past testing into live operations. Not long from now, experts say, over 400 million robots using artificial intelligence might activate, stretching across factories, roads, skies. This surge? It pulls hard on the need for systems that handle real, time information flows, the kind feeding both training and daily function of these devices.
“Everyone is focused on building bigger models,” said Ulrik Stig Hansen, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Encord. “But for physical AI, the bottleneck isn’t model size. It’s data readiness. You can have the most sophisticated model in the world, and it will still fail if the data feeding it is incomplete, inconsistent, or misaligned with real-world conditions. That’s the problem we solve.”
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Encord currently supports more than 300 AI teams worldwide, including organizations such as Woven by Toyota, Zipline, Skydio, and AXA. Over the past year, the company has experienced strong momentum driven by the surge in physical AI adoption. Data managed on the platform increased from 1 petabyte to more than 5 petabytes, while revenue from physical AI customers grew tenfold during the same period.
Encord’s platform supports the full lifecycle of AI data operations, from facilitating data generation and ingestion in the pre-training phase to enabling model evaluation and alignment through human feedback after deployment. By providing a unified data layer, the company aims to help AI teams continuously improve model performance while maintaining reliability in complex real-world environments.
Bill Tinney, Senior Director of AI Product Management and Partnerships at Vantor, an Encord customer, said, “At Vantor, we build AI for critical infrastructure and national security – we needed a data platform that could match our ambitions. Encord gives us a unified data layer that scales with the complexity of our geospatial workflows, from curation to annotation to evaluation, without tool fragmentation. For production AI teams, how you operationalize your data is a core competitive advantage.”
Eric Landau, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Encord, said the funding will accelerate product development and expansion into new markets. “The companies winning in physical AI understand something that others are just beginning to realize: the model is only as good as the data behind it. We’re building the infrastructure that makes that data usable not just once, but continuously, as these systems learn and improve in the real world.”
