Sapien.io: A Decentralized Data Foundry Raises $10.5M

Data is the biggest opportunity in AI.

Today, enterprises turn to centralized data facilities that earn billions in revenue by employing millions of humans to create and structure data to fuel their models.

But it’s not enough. In-person data facilities can’t scale to employ the billions of humans needed to meet demand. Nor can they attract experts in specialized fields, who are needed to produce high-quality data to progress AI to human-level reasoning.

Introducing Sapien

Sapien has raised $10.5 million in seed funding, led by Variant, to solve this problem. Sapien is a human-powered data foundry that matches enterprise AI models with a decentralized network of AI Workers who get paid to produce data from their phones. On Sapien, AI Workers are matched with optimal data tasks based on their skills and preferences.

Why Decentralize AI Workers

Scalability: Data farms use humans to check humans. Sapien uses onchain incentives to reward quality automatically—unlocking global scale while keeping synthetic-data-producing bots out.

Quality: A global pool of diverse AI Workers reduces localized biases, resulting in higher-quality data. This has established a network effect for Sapien and a data moat for our customers.

Onchain payments: Sapien’s global payment integrations ensure AI Workers get paid instantly with negligible fees—a sharp contrast to vendors today, who often hold pay for weeks to police quality.

Gamification: If data labeling is fun, engaging, and even competitive, more people will want to participate. So we gamified the entire experience to make work feel like play.

Traction

Sapien’s decentralized data-creation model has already gained traction with workers and enterprises alike and is scaling rapidly.

Workers

The Sapien network now spans 70 countries and is growing 50% MoM with help from onchain partners like World and Yield Guild Games. Our AI Worker network is already larger than any in-person workforce and includes experts like international doctors, lawyers, and software engineers who refuse to relocate to in-person “data farms.”

In the past month:

• An oncologist earned hundreds of dollars per hour on the weekend by drawing bounding boxes around tumor cells for a cancer research model.
• A Mandarin-speaking mathematician structured a calculus dataset for an upcoming MathGPT model.
• A high school geometry student earned additional income for his family by annotating 3D autonomous-driving data.

Enterprise

Since our founding last summer, we've seen accelerating corporate demand for frontier data and now serve 17 global enterprise customers (including Fortune 500s) across key verticals like autonomous driving, education, medical research, and institutional DeFi. For example:

• A pioneering diffusion model switched to Sapien due to our diverse human network.
• One of the largest education companies in Asia leveraged Sapien’s 99+% accuracy benchmark to power its new vertical education models.
• A global automobile manufacturer awarded us an exclusive autonomous driving contract due to our AI Worker scalability.

With our industry-leading accuracy and cost structure, Sapien is a new option for enterprise models to forge frontier data.

Our Team

Sapien's leaders know how to scale onchain products. CEO Rowan Stone co-created Base, Coinbase's record-breaking layer 2 blockchain with millions of users. CSO Trevor Koverko founded Polymath and authored the real-world asset standard, ERC1400. Now they're building the world's largest network of human AI workers.

Variant-Led Fundraise

Our recent seed funding round—led by Variant with participation from Primitive Ventures, Animoca, Yield Guilde Games, HF0, and notable angels like YGG founder Gabby Dizon and SoftBank Vision Fund alum Kevin Jiang—brings our total funding to $10.5M.

With this funding, we are preparing for our next phase of growth by improving our tooling and infrastructure to better match enterprise data pipelines with the optimal human AI Worker as well as continue the development of AI-20, an interoperability standard for decentralized training data with research collaboration from leading DeAI project OpenLedger.

Join the AI Worker Mobilization

Sapien is proof that AI and humans can work together symbiotically, as billions of humans can now earn a living wage regardless of skills, assets, or socio-economic background. As enterprise models proliferate, we predict AI Work will surpass all existing gig economies in scale and impact.

If this mission resonates with you, join the Sapien movement.

• Enterprise AI models seeking human-produced data: Join Sapien Enterprise.
• AI Workers: Enroll in the world's largest AI workforce to start earning today.
• Join our team: Build the future of decentralized data production. Explore open roles.