Datacurve is Taking on Scale AI, Building Frontier Coding Data for Foundation Model Labs

Datacurve, providing high-quality and complexity data, unlocking model improvements and new capabilities, led by Serena Ge and Charley Lee, has secured $15 million Series A round, led by Mark Goldberg at Chemistry Ventures with participation from employees at DeepMind, Vercel, Anthropic, and OpenAI. The Series A comes after a $2.7 million seed round, which drew investment from former Coinbase CTO Balaji Srinivasan.

Datacurve employs a “bounty hunter” model to bring skilled software engineers onto hard-to-source datasets, having distributed over $1 million in bounties to date. According to co-founder Serena Ge, the biggest draw isn’t money; while data work pays less than typical software roles, the company’s true advantage lies in providing a compelling and engaging user experience.

Whereas earlier AI models relied on simple datasets, today’s products require complex reinforcement learning environments built through strategic data collection. As these environments grow in sophistication, the demand for high-quality, large-scale data intensifies, giving companies like Datacurve a potential advantage.

Currently focused on software engineering, Datacurve’s model could also extend to fields such as finance, marketing, or medicine.