Encord, the data infrastructure company for physical AI, has raised $60 million in a Series C round led by Wellington Management. The round brings the company’s total funding to $110 million and signals growing investor confidence that data infrastructure, not just model development, is where the physical AI race will be won or lost.
Existing backers Y Combinator, CRV, N47, Crane Venture Partners, and Harpoon Ventures all participated. New investors Bright Pixel Capital and Isomer Capital also joined the round.
Physical AI Is Moving Out of the Lab
For years, physical AI, the technology powering robots, autonomous vehicles, drones, and other systems that operate in the real world, existed mostly as a research concept. That is changing fast. Analysts project more than 400 million AI robots will come online within the next four years, with the industry expected to surpass $30 billion over the same period.
The challenge this creates is not what most people assume. Unlike large language models trained on publicly available internet data, physical AI systems must learn from proprietary sources: sensor feeds, video footage, robotic telemetry, and edge cases collected in the field. This data is harder to store, more expensive to process, and far more difficult to organize than text.
That data doesn’t manage itself. Continuously feeding the right data into a model, and keeping the wrong data out, requires infrastructure that legacy data platforms simply weren’t designed to provide.
“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.”
Where the Funding Goes
The new capital will go toward accelerating product development and expanding Encord’s reach into new markets. The company’s AI-native platform currently helps teams manage, curate, annotate, and align multimodal data across the full model lifecycle, from pre-training data generation through to model alignment using human feedback.
Eric Landau, Co-Founder and Co-CEO, described the broader ambition: “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.”
The Company Behind the Platform
Encord was built to solve a problem that became obvious as AI teams started working with physical world data at scale. Legacy data platforms were designed for structured text or simple image annotation. They were not built to handle audio, video, 3D point clouds, sensor data, and other formats that physical AI systems depend on.
Today, Encord works with over 300 AI teams globally, including Woven by Toyota, Skydio, and AXA Financial. The platform covers every stage of the data pipeline, from curation and annotation to evaluation and continuous data redeployment as models evolve.
Growth over the past twelve months reflects the surge in physical AI adoption. Data volume on the platform grew from one petabyte to over five petabytes, more than three times the data used to train GPT-4. Revenue from physical AI customers grew 10x over the same period.
Bill Tinney, Senior Director of AI Product Management and Partnerships at Vantor, an Encord customer, put it directly: “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.”
Investor Lineup and Funding History
Wellington Management led this Series C, joined by new investors Bright Pixel Capital and Isomer Capital. Returning investors include Y Combinator, CRV, N47, Crane Venture Partners, and Harpoon Ventures. The round brings Encord’s total capital raised to $110 million since founding.
