Ben Wiley and Tomer Cohen first met while working on a project together at Scale AI.David AI If David AI founders Tomer Cohen and Ben Wiley had been a little less quick on their feet, they might not have made it into Y Combinator’s Summer 2024 batch. They agreed to create the company about a week before application submissions closed, and spent the ensuing days crashing theirs out, turning it in at midnight on the day of the deadline. After hitting submit, “I was like, did that count as late or was that on time?” Cohen recalls. A year later, David AI, the company they founded through Y Combinator, has quickly established itself as a leading provider of audio training data for artificial intelligence. Now it's closed a million Series A round, led by Altman Capital and Amplify Partners, with participation from First Round Capital, Y Combinator and BoxGroup, with a valuation north of million. Cohen is a former McKinsey business analyst and first met cofounder Wiley while working together at AI training behemoth Scale AI. The two became close friends, and after Cohen was promoted to chief of staff and built a new business for the firm, he felt he had the skills he needed to start a company. “We started to think that the next phase of AI, the final evolution of AI, is where the AI moves out of the laptop and keyboard interface and into the real world,” Cohen told Forbes. That idea became David AI, an audio data research company providing high quality training audio for AI companies building voice models. The needs here are varied and highly specific, so David AI not only collects and refines real world audio data, it also designs and produces it. It’s amassed about 100,000 hours of audio so far, across more than 15 languages, complete with metadata on dialects and accents. In the heady world of AI, it’s a relatively simple business: paying individuals to read scripts or host conversations and recording them. “If you're an AI lab, you probably want to be focused on algorithms and model development and not just this very low-level operational, technical, niche work,” Cohen said. And it appears he’s right. In the year since its founding, David AI has grown to more than eight figures in annualized revenue run rate, making customers of most of the “magnificent Seven” tech companies — Alphabet, Amazon, Apple, Meta, etc. As Liz Wessel, a partner at First Round Capital, notes, that’s hardly surprising. “It makes sense,” she said. “Everyone knows that it's been text-based AI for the last couple of years with ChatGPT, and now everyone is starting to figure out how to bring AI to voice.” Wessel was one of David AI’s first investors, leading the million seed round it closed in January. She continues to see promise in the company given the massive data shortage that AI firms are facing. Sarah Catanzaro, an investor and general partner at Amplify Partners, agrees. “Companies are just voracious for data nowadays,” she said. “The beauty ofis it solves this urgent need that voice AI developers face today…but it's also a relatively simple solution. If they need data, sell them data, you don't need to overcomplicate it.” #this #combinator #startup #cashing #feeding