Snorkel AI Triples Its Valuation to $3.5 Billion
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Snorkel AI Triples Its Valuation to $3.5 Billion
The Series E values Snorkel at roughly nine times the $375 million annualized revenue run rate it disclosed alongside the round.
Snorkel AI raised $350 million in a Series E round that values the AI training-data company at $3.5 billion, up from the $1.3 billion valuation it held after a $100 million Series D in May 2025, the company said Sept. 22.
Insight Partners and S32 co-led the round. New investors March Capital, Blumberg Capital, Allegis Capital, Frontline, Standard and Third Point Ventures joined returning backers Addition, Greylock, Lightspeed, GV, Prosperity7, Walden Catalyst and Wells Fargo, according to Snorkel's announcement.
The revenue number behind the $3.5 billion
Snorkel said its annualized revenue run rate has reached $375 million, up 18-fold over the past 12 months. That puts the new valuation at roughly nine times disclosed revenue, a smaller multiple than at least one other AI-infrastructure company has fetched: TechCrunch reported in June that data-security company Cyera's $12 billion valuation implied roughly 80 times its annual recurring revenue.
Founded in 2019 out of four years of research at the Stanford AI Lab, Snorkel started by selling data-labeling automation software. It has since shifted to what it calls a data-as-a-service model, combining synthetic data generation with paid subject-matter experts to build the training and evaluation sets that frontier labs use to fine-tune models.
Why the 18-fold growth number needs a caveat
Snorkel is not the fastest-growing company in its category by headline revenue. TechCrunch reported that Mercor has reached $2 billion in gross annualized revenue, Handshake has reached $1 billion and Micro1 has reached $500 million, all ahead of Snorkel's $375 million. All three, like Snorkel, pay a large share of that revenue directly to the human experts who label and evaluate the data, typically 60 percent to 70 percent of it, which means the net revenue behind each headline figure is smaller than it looks. Snorkel's announcement did not break out what portion of its own $375 million is passed through to contributors.
What the money is for
Chief Executive and co-founder Alex Ratner said the funding will expand the capacity of what Snorkel calls its agentic data factory, extend the company's research into new domains and modalities, and add investment in vertical and enterprise AI deployments. "The teams pushing the frontier want a research data partner who pioneers the science of data development," Ratner said in the announcement.
Insight Partners managing director Lonne Jaffe and S32 chief executive Andy Harrison also backed the round. The Series E follows a run of AI-focused startup financings in the same stretch, including Kaiko's $110 million Series B in crypto market data and TypeSafe's $40 million seed round for its Jev model.
None of the four companies TechCrunch named in its report on the category, Snorkel, Mercor, Handshake and Micro1, has disclosed audited financials. A future funding filing or public listing would be the first independent check on any of the revenue figures now circulating.
Snorkel's valuation history
| Round | Date | Raised | Valuation |
|---|---|---|---|
| Series D | May 2025 | $100 million | $1.3 billion |
| Series E | Sept. 22, 2026 | $350 million | $3.5 billion |
- Mercor (gross)2000 $M
- Handshake (gross)1000 $M
- Micro1500 $M
- Snorkel AI375 $M
Source: TechCrunch, accessed 2026-09-23
Sources
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