AI & crowdsourcing platform Playment lands USD 1.6 M for pre-Series A
Playment
Founders: Siddharth Mall, Akshay Lal, Ajinkya Malasane
Founded in: 2015
Financing status: USD 1.6 million as part of its pre-Series A round in 2017
Bangalore-based artificial intelligence (AI)-driven crowdsourcing platform Playment has raised USD 1.6 million in a pre-Series A funding round led by Y Combinator, Sparkland Capital, and Silicon Valley angel investors, such as Ryan Petersen (CEO of Flexport), Max Altman, David Petersen, and others. Playment was in Y Combinator’s Winter 2017 batch.
Playment was founded in 2015 by IIT-Kharagpur alumni Siddharth Mall and Akshay Lal, along with IIT-Guwahati alumnus Ajinkya Malasane. The three all previously worked at India’s leading e-commerce company Flipkar. Mall and Malasane were previously senior business analysts in product management, while Lal also previously worked in product function.
Playment is an AI-driven mobile crowdsourcing platform. It helps clients in areas of image annotation, transcription, text analysis, content moderation, and data collection. After the client shares data and labelling guidelines to Playment, the startup will provide a project manager who prepares task instructions, trains the workforce, sets up workflows, and ensures that contract level services are delivered consistently. The startup claims to have over 300,000 skilled professionals working on its mobile and web apps. And it claims to have clients such as Alibaba, Flipkart, Paytm, Ola, Cleartrip, etc.
Earlier in July 2016, Playment raised around USD 700,000 from SAIF Partners in a pre-Series A funding round.
The startup will use the newly raised investment to build its teams of engineering, products, and data science. It will also build an internal AI research lab and set up an office in the Bay Area.
(Top photo from Playment website)
