ENCORD SECURES $60M SERIES C TO SCALE AI-NATIVE DATA INFRASTRUCTURE AS PHYSICAL AI HITS INFLECTION POINT

Wellington Management-Led Round Brings Encord's Total Funding to $110M as Company Sees Physical AI Revenue Grow 10x in Last Twelve Months

SAN FRANCISCO, Feb. 26, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- Encord, the data infrastructure company for physical AI, today announced a $60 million Series C led by Wellington Management, bringing the company's total funding to $110 million. Existing investors Y Combinator, CRV, N47, Crane Venture Partners and Harpoon Ventures also participated in the round alongside new investors Bright Pixel Capital and Isomer Capital.

The investment will help Encord scale its AI-native data infrastructure platform, which helps AI teams manage, curate, annotate, and align the multimodal data that physical AI systems depend on, including audio, video, images, sensor data, 3D point clouds and other formats that legacy data platforms weren't built to handle.

Encord works with over 300 AI teams globally, including Woven by Toyota, Zipline, Skydio, AXA Financial and numerous physical AI and frontier labs. The company has seen significant growth in both revenue and data volume on its platform in the last twelve months as a result of the surge in physical AI.

The Inflection Point in Physical AI

Encord's Series C comes as physical AI - which powers robots, autonomous vehicles, drones, and other systems that operate in the real world - enters an explosive new growth stage. After years of lab demos and pilot programs, these systems are moving into production. Analysts project that over 400 million AI robots will come online in just the next 4 years, and that the size of the physical AI industry will eclipse $30B over the same time period.

Unlike large language models, which were trained on the open internet, physical AI models must learn from proprietary data, including sensor feeds, video, robotic telemetry, edge cases captured in the field and other sources. Storing and processing this data requires more computational power than storing and processing text.

That data doesn't organize itself. Getting the right data into the models and keeping the wrong data out—continuously, at scale—requires purpose-built AI-native data infrastructure.

"Everyone is focused on building bigger models," said Ulrik Stig Hansen, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Encord. "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."

Encord has seen demand surge as physical AI moves from experimentation to deployment:

• Data on the company's platform has grown from 1 petabyte to over 5 petabytes in twelve months—3x more than the data used to train GPT-4
• Revenue from physical AI customers has grown 10x over the same period

Encord's physical AI platform allows leading AI companies and teams to capture, organize and redeploy data across the model lifecycle. From facilitating data generation in the pre-training phase to aligning models in accordance with human feedback, Encord's software is designed to handle every data automation and processing task physical AI companies may encounter.

Bill Tinney, Senior Director of AI Product Management and Partnerships at Vantor, an Encord customer, 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."

Eric Landau, Co-Founder and Co-CEO of Encord, said the funding will accelerate product development and expansion into new markets. "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."

About Encord

Encord is the universal data layer for AI. The platform helps AI teams train and run their models with the right data - managing, curating, annotating, and aligning data across the full AI lifecycle. Encord works with over 300 leading AI teams, including Woven by Toyota, Zipline, AXA, and Skydio.

Media Contact:
Chris Clemens
Nexios Communications Strategies
chris@nexioscomms.com

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