Zurich-based AI infrastructure startup Rapidata raises €7.2 million to scale global human feedback network

Rapidata, a Swiss company that accelerates AI development through scalable, on-demand data labeling via digital ads, announced a €7.2 million ($8.5 million) Seed round to scale their global human data network and support growing demand from AI companies that need faster, more reliable feedback to train, validate, and improve their models in an increasingly competitive market.

The round was co-led by Canaan Partners and IA Ventures with participation from Acequia Capital and BlueYard.

“Human feedback has become the limiting factor in AI progress,” says Jason Corkill, CEO and founder of Rapidata. “Rapidata removes that ceiling by making human judgment available at a global scale and near real time, unlocking a future where AI teams can run constant feedback loops and build systems that evolve every day instead of every release cycle. At this speed of iteration, entirely new AI innovation becomes possible.”

Rapidata’s €7.2 million Seed round joins a set of European AI and data infrastructure funding announcements covered by EU-Startups in 2025-2026.

Swiss data governance and observability platform Qala raised €1.7 million to strengthen enterprise data governance in the AI era. German synthetic data provider simmetry.ai secured a €330k grant to develop scalable synthetic training datasets, tackling AI’s data bottleneck. London-based Stanhope AI raised €6.7 million to build adaptive AI systems with real-world interaction models, and Stockholm’s Agaton closed an €8.4 million Seed round to embed AI agents into business data workflows.

While not all these companies are strictly in data labelling, they reflect a broader pattern of European investment in tools and infrastructure that improve data quality, AI training processes, and actionable AI outputs – the same ecosystem in which Rapidata is positioned.

Among these, Qala is another Swiss company gaining early funding, indicating growing investor interest within Switzerland alongside broader continental activity.

“Rapidata helps us test our voice models with real users in real contexts worldwide – in days, not months,” says Lily Clifford, CEO, Rime. “Previously, gathering meaningful feedback meant cobbling together vendors and surveys, segment by segment, or country by country, which didn’t scale. Now we can quickly reach the right audiences and see how our models perform in real customer workflows and not just in isolated tests. This faster, higher-quality feedback through Rapidata has accelerated our iteration and helped fuel our rapid growth.”

Founded in 2023, Rapidata is an AI infrastructure company that enables AI teams to  collect large volumes of high-quality human feedback. Using crowd intelligence and a global network of human participants, Rapidata reportedly dramatically reduces the time and cost required to label, validate, and refine datasets used to train and evaluate AI models.

By compressing feedback cycles from months into days, Rapidata helps AI companies iterate faster, bring products to market sooner, and scale human intelligence alongside modern AI systems.

The AI infrastructure and Reinforcement Learning from Human Feedback (RLHF) startup says they are tackling one of AI’s biggest bottlenecks: the slow, manual process of collecting large-scale human feedback to train and improve models.

While compute and model architectures have advanced rapidly, collecting high-quality human judgments, preferences, and validation data remains slow, expensive, and operationally complex.

The company outlines that traditional approaches often require weeks or months to complete a single feedback cycle, delaying model improvements and limiting how quickly teams can iterate.

Rapidata says they solve this problem by enabling AI companies to gather massive volumes of feedback from people at unprecedented speed and scale. Instead of relying on static annotation workforces or limited labeling pools, Rapidata gives AI teams access to a continuously available global network of people, enabling feedback cycles that once took months to complete to be completed in days or even within a single day.

“The output of our foundation model for human motion needs to be of high quality and feel real. Rapidata not only helps us evaluate the model at scale, but also informs inputs into the model, that help us remain best in class”, says Viren Tellis, CEO, Uthana. “Once we started iterating on our model we quickly ran into the limits of internal or overseas human evaluation. With Rapidata we do not run in to the risk of stalling our growth.”

Rapidata integrates directly into existing AI development workflows and enables customers to request targeted human feedback on demand. The platform distributes short, opt-in tasks through widely used consumer applications, reaching tens of millions of users globally daily without disrupting their experience.

“Jason Corkill is one of the greatest founders I’ve encountered in my career. Every serious AI deployment depends on human judgment somewhere in the lifecycle,” shares Jared Newman, who led the investment at Canaan Partners. “As models move from expertise-based tasks to taste-based curation, the demand for scalable human feedback will grow dramatically. Rapidata is positioned to serve a market that spans foundation models, enterprise AI, and the next generation of AI-driven products.”

The post Zurich-based AI infrastructure startup Rapidata raises €7.2 million to scale global human feedback network appeared first on EU-Startups.