Deccan AI - a startup specializing in providing post-training data and AI model evaluation, has just raised 25 million USD in the Series A funding round entirely with shares. The funding round is led by A91 Partners, with the participation of Susquehanna International Group and Prosus Ventures.
In the context that AI laboratories such as OpenAI or Anthropic focus on developing core models, most of the post-training work is being outsourced. These tasks include data creation, evaluation and enhanced learning to improve reliability in actual deployment. Deccan AI emerged as a unit to meet this need.
Established in October 2024, Deccan AI provides many services, from improving model programming capabilities, developing AI agents, to training systems to interact with APIs and integration with enterprise software. The company also develops products such as Helix evaluation toolkits and automation platforms.
This startup is currently partnering with many AI laboratories in tasks of collecting expert feedback, building enhanced learning environments and model evaluation. Customers are said to include Google DeepMind and Snowflake. According to Deccan AI founder Rukesh Reddy, the company has about 10 customers and is implementing dozens of projects at the same time.
Deccan AI is headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area, and operates a large team in Hyderabad, India. The company has about 125 employees and a network of over 1 million collaborators, including students, experts and PhDs. Each month there are about 5,000 to 10,000 active collaborators, of which about 10% have postgraduate degrees.
The AI training service market is growing rapidly along with the explosion of large language models. Many businesses such as Scale AI, Surge AI, Turing or Mercor are competing in the field of data labeling and model evaluation.
According to Mr. Rukesh Reddy, quality is still a major challenge in the post-training phase, when errors can directly affect system performance in the actual environment. This phase requires specialized data, high accuracy and difficult scale expansion, and also requires rapid progress when laboratories need large amounts of data in just a few days.
The field also faces much debate about working conditions and income for freelancers. Reddy said income on the Deccan platform ranges from $10 to $700 per hour, with leading collaborators reaching $7,000 per month.
Reddy said the company is built according to the "born with generative AI" orientation, focusing on highly skillful tasks from the beginning. In the past year, Deccan AI recorded a 10-fold increase and reached millions of USD in revenue each year. About 80% of revenue comes from 5 major customers, showing the high concentration of the advanced AI market.
