Encord

Nick Gillian looked at the AI industry and realized something most people missed—you can have the best model architecture in the world, but if your data is garbage, your model is garbage. So he built Encord, the multimodal data layer that powers physical AI from the first training run to real-world deployment. They just closed a Series C and have raised $110M total. That's not chump change—that's serious conviction from serious investors that data infrastructure is the bottleneck holding back the next generation of AI.

Here's the deal: physical AI—robots, autonomous systems, anything that interacts with the physical world—needs completely different data than chatbots. We're talking massive datasets across video, sensors, 3D point clouds, and more. Encord built the entire stack: labeling, data building, and alignment across every modality, all in one place. They're the data infrastructure behind the leading AI systems, and if physical AI is going to actually work in the real world, it runs through Encord. The world is going physical, and Encord is making sure the data is ready.