Encord raises £44.4m to ready video and sensor data for production-grade robots
This article covers Encord, an AI startup, which has raised £44.4m in a series C funding round led by Wellington Management, bringing its total financing to £81.4m. The funding will be used to scale Encord's AI-native data infrastructure for production-grade physical AI systems, supporting startups and teams developing robots, drones and autonomous vehicles.
Encord, an AI startup, has raised £44.4m ($60m) in a series C funding round led by Wellington Management, bringing the company’s total financing to £81.4m. The capital will be used to scale Encord’s AI-native data infrastructure as demand for production-grade physical AI — the systems that power robots, drones and autonomous vehicles — accelerates.
Why it matters
Physical AI systems rely on large volumes of proprietary, multimodal data — video, audio, sensor streams, 3D point clouds and telemetry — rather than the internet-scale text used to train large language models. Encord’s raise signals that investors see data infrastructure as a critical bottleneck for production deployments of these systems.
Encord reports platform data growing from 1 petabyte to over 5 petabytes in the last twelve months and a 10x rise in revenue from physical AI customers over the same period. Analysts cited in the announcement project rapid expansion of the sector: more than 400 million AI robots online in the next four years and a physical AI market exceeding £22.2bn ($30bn) over a similar timeframe.
Inside the product
Encord positions its platform as a universal data layer that manages, curates, annotates and aligns data across the model lifecycle. That includes capabilities for data generation in pre-training, annotation workflows, evaluation and continuous alignment with human feedback — functions that legacy data platforms were not designed to handle.
The company says it works with over 300 AI teams globally. Clients named in the announcement include Woven by Toyota, delivery drone company Zipline, autonomous drone maker Skydio, and insurer AXA Financial. These names illustrate the platform’s focus on complex, safety-sensitive applications where data quality and traceability matter.
In the announcement, Bill Tinney, Senior Director of AI Product Management and Partnerships at Vantor, said:
At Vantor, we build AI for critical infrastructure and national security – we needed a data platform that could match our ambitions. Encord gives us a unified data layer that scales with the complexity of our geospatial workflows, from curation to annotation to evaluation, without tool fragmentation. For production AI teams, how you operationalize your data is a core competitive advantage.
Who are the investors?
The round was led by Wellington Management and includes participation from existing backers Y Combinator, CRV, N47, Crane Venture Partners and Harpoon Ventures. New investors named are Bright Pixel Capital and Isomer Capital. The raise brings Encord’s total funding to around £81.4m ($110m).
Investors are funding Encord to expand product development and international market reach at a time when customers are moving from pilots to production. The mix of US institutional capital alongside venture and specialist investors in Europe reflects growing cross-border interest in companies that provide infrastructure for physical AI.
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Founder perspective
In the announcement, Ulrik Stig Hansen, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Encord, said:
Everyone is focused on building bigger models, but for physical AI, the bottleneck isn’t model size. It’s data readiness. You can have the most sophisticated model in the world, and it will still fail if the data feeding it is incomplete, inconsistent, or misaligned with real-world conditions. That’s the problem we solve.
In the announcement, Eric Landau, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Encord, said:
The companies winning in physical AI understand something that others are just beginning to realize: the model is only as good as the data behind it. We’re building the infrastructure that makes that data usable—not just once, but continuously, as these systems learn and improve in the real world.
The bigger picture
Encord’s series C is part of a broader shift in investor focus from model architectures to the data and systems needed to run models safely at scale. For the UK and Europe, the deal highlights a market opportunity for companies specialising in data tooling for robotics, autonomous transport and other real-world AI applications.
The participation of both US and European investors underscores continued cross-border capital flows into AI infrastructure. As physical AI deployments move into regulated and mission-critical domains, demand for robust data platforms that provide provenance, annotation quality and lifecycle management will likely grow — creating a clearer product-market fit for companies such as Encord.
This funding round adds to momentum for UK and European AI startups working on infrastructure and tooling, and it reflects rising interest from AI investors in technology that operationalises real-world data for production systems.
They've invested in Encord
Get to know these AI investors
| Investor | Sector | Stage | Activity | Team | Connect |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 Wellington Management | 1 investment investment | more info | |||
 Y Combinator | 30 investments investments | 10 contacts contacts | |||
 CRV | 2 investments investments | more info | |||
 Crane Venture Partners | 4 investments investments | 7 contacts contacts | |||
 Harpoon Ventures | 1 investment investment | more info | |||
 Bright Pixel Capital | 2 investments investments | more info | |||
 Isomer Capital | 3 investments investments | 6 contacts contacts |
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