Seoul-based Datumo raises $15.5M to take on Scale AI, backed by Salesforce

Most organizations say that they are not fully prepared to use generative AI in a safe and responsible manner, According to a recent report from McKinsey. A concern is explanatory – understanding how and why AI makes certain decisions. While 40% of the respondents consider it a significant risk, only 17% actively, according to the report.

Seoul established Dateo Started as an AI data company and now wants to help companies build safer AI with tools and data that make testing, monitoring and improving their models possible – without requiring technical expertise. On Monday, the startup collected $ 15.5 million, which its totally increased to around $ 28 million, from investors, including Salesforce Ventures, KB Investment, ACVC Partners and SBI investments, among other things.

David Kim, CEO of Dateo and a former AI investigator at Korea’s Agency for Defense Development, was frustrated by the time-consuming nature of database, so he came up with a new idea: a reward-based app with which someone can label data and earn money. The startup validated the idea at a startup competition at Kaist (Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology). Kim was co-founder of Dateo, formerly known as Selectstar, in addition to five Kaist-Alumni in 2018.

Even before the app was fully built, Dateo assured tens of thousands of dollars in pre-contract during the customer discovery phase of the competition, usually of alumnale companies and startups led by Kaist.

In the first year, the startup $ 1 million exceeded income and achieved various important contracts. Nowadays the startup has large Korean companies such as Samsung, Samsung SDS, LG Electronics, LG CNS, Hyundai, retirement and Seoul-based telecom giant SK-Telecom among its customers. A few years ago, however, customers started asking the company to go further than simple data tennis. The 7-year-old startup now has more than 300 customers in South Korea and generated around $ 6 million in income in 2024.

“They wanted us to score their AI model outputs or compare them with other outputs,” Michael Hwang, co-founder of Dateo, told WAN. “Then we realized: we already did ai -model evaluation – without even knowing it.” Dateo doubled this area and released the first benchmark -gone set of Korea aimed at AI Trust and Safety, Hwang added.

“We started with data -annotation and then extended to preturious data sets and evaluation as the LLM ecosystem grew up,” Kim told WAN.

Meta’s recent $ 14.3 billion Acquisition-like investments in Data Label Business scale AI emphasizes the importance of this market. Shortly after that deal, AI model maker and Meta -Compurcurrent Openai stopped using the services of Scale AI. The Meta deal also indicates that the competition for AI training data is intensifying.

Dateo shares some similarities with companies such as Scale AI in setting up dataset, and with Galileo and Ari Ai in AI evaluation and monitoring. However, it distinguishes itself through its recognized data sets, in particular data crawled from published books, the company says that the rich structured human reasoning offers, but notoir is difficult to clean, according to CEO Kim.

In contrast to his colleagues, Dateo also offers a full-stack evaluation platform called Dateo -ValThat automatic test data and evaluations generates to check for unsafe, biased or incorrect answers without the need for manual scripting, Kim added. The characteristic product is a no-code evaluation tool that is designed for non-developers such as that with policy, trust and safety and compliance teams.

When he was asked about attracting investors such as Salesforce Ventures, Kim explained that the startup had previously organized a Hireside chat with Andrew NG, founder of Deeplearning.ai, during an event in South Korea. After the event, Kim shared the session on LinkedIn, who attracted the attention of Salesforce Ventures. After various meetings and zoom discussions, the investors released a soft bet. The entire financing process lasted about eight months, Hwang said.

The new financing will be used to accelerate R&D efforts, in particular when developing automated evaluation tools for Enterprise AI, and for global go-to-market operations in South Korea, Japan, and the US in scaling, the Startup, which 150 employees in Seoul has also a presence.

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