Carbon Arc Inc., a startup that provides data for artificial intelligence models, has raised $56 million in funding to finance growth initiatives.

The company announced the investment today. Liberty City Ventures led the round with participation from K5 Global, Raptor Group and Wasserman Media Group.

Sourcing data for AI projects involves multiple challenges. Developers must either create the data from scratch, which can be prohibitively expensive, or find organizations that possess the needed information. If a company opts for the latter route, it has to sign licensing agreements with each of the organizations from which it plans to source records.

New York-based Carbon Arc is working to ease the data procurement process. The company operates a cloud service, Insights Exchange, that offers datasets optimized for AI use. The platform launched this morning in conjunction with Carbon Arc’s funding announcement.

Insights Exchange allows companies to purchase datasets under a consumption-based pricing model. According to Carbon Arc, that arrangement is simpler than signing licensing agreements with multiple data suppliers. Insights Exchange currently offers access to several petabytes’ worth of information from multiple sectors. 

Besides streamlining procurement, Carbon Arc also eases the task of preparing data for processing. Datasets sourced from different sources are often formatted in different ways, which can complicate analysis. Carbon Arc says that its platform organizes information into a structured, standardized format to speed up processing.

One of the ways Insights Exchange speeds up data preparation is by providing a so-called unified ontology. The feature helps AI models determine when datasets contain fields that are formatted differently, but contain the same type of information. For example, purchase log collections from two competing e-commerce stores might both have columns that display the ten largest transactions.

Insights Exchange enables users to interact with the information it hosts in multiple ways. 

A query tool makes it possible to find records that describe a specific sector, company or product. A restaurant chain, for example, could surface AI training datasets that contain information about competitors. Alongside the query tool, Carbon Arc provides dozens of prepackaged graphs that visualize the data to ease analysis. 

“We are building the exchange that turns data into a liquid, tradable asset,” said Carbon Arc co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Kirk McKeown. “We’re unlocking private data, turning it into insights, and getting it into the hands of decision-makers who need it.”

Carbon Arc will use its newly raised funding to sign up more data providers to its platform. The effort will prioritize organizations in the finance, healthcare, media and retail segments. The company also plans to enhance its platform’s ontology feature. 

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