Labelbox Inc., which makes software that speeds the labeling of training data in machine and deep learning applications, today said it closed a $40 million Series C funding round, bringing its total funding to $79 million.

The company declined to release its estimated valuation.

Founded in 2018, Labelbox addresses the time-consuming chore of labeling data for use in training artificial intelligence models. Human experts are typically needed to identify, for example, that a mass on a radiology scan is a cancer or that the vessel in an image is a sailboat rather than an ocean liner. “Machine learning teams have to do this over millions of data points and feed it into neural networks,” said Manu Sharma, Labelbox’s co-founder and chief executive.

The company provides software infrastructure to enable AI teams to shortcut the creation of appropriate labels and capture human assessments across large number of people. “Teams can plug in their own AI models and automate their labeling so they can focus only on the data points that are going to improve model performance,” Sharma said.

The software works by analyzing AI models to guide data scientists to the labels they should use as well as to pre-label data to speed up the process. Data scientists can upload pre-labeled assets in bulk and companies can connect and collaborate across databases and labeling services regardless of time zone or geography.

Labelbox says its technology can reduce human effort by 80%. That’s significant because, by many accounts, the labeling process alone can consume up to 80% of the time of building and training and AI model.

“It is a common mistake to underestimate and trivialize data labeling,” Andrej Karpathy, director of AI at Tesla Motors Inc., wrote in a tweet.

Grand View Research Inc. estimates that the global data collection and labeling market will grow more than 25% annually through 2028.

Labelbox plans to invest the funds in product development, marketing and sales. It expects to double its workforce to 200 people by the end of this year. “Our goal is to enable full AI supervision inside Labelbox,” Sharma said.

Investors in this round include led by B Capital Group US LLC along with previous investors Andreessen Horowitz LLC, First Round Capital, Gradient Ventures, Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers and Catherine Wood, CEO of ARK Investment Management LLC.

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