Overview
- The Y Combinator W24 startup closed the round led by Mark Goldberg at Chemistry, bringing total funding to about $17.7 million after a $2.7 million seed.
- Participants included employees from DeepMind, Vercel, Anthropic, and OpenAI, and the prior seed drew investment from Balaji Srinivasan.
- Datacurve builds domain-specific code datasets and evaluation assets, including supervised fine-tuning corpora, RLHF pipelines, repo-level RL environments, a Private Repo Taskbench, and developer telemetry traces.
- Its Shipd platform sources data through a gamified, output-paid bounty system; the company reports a pool of roughly 14,000 contributors and more than $1 million paid in bounties.
- The funding comes as Big Tech tightens control of data pipelines, with Meta hiring Scale AI’s founder, while rivals like Mercor and Surge expand and buyers prioritize provenance, security, and IP hygiene.