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Snorkel AI plans to play offense as the data market consolidates, with fresh capital earmarked for M&A, CEO Alex Ratner tells Axios Pro.

The big picture: Demand for training and evaluation data has surged as AI systems grow more complex.

Driving the news: San Francisco-based Snorkel this week raised $350 million at a $3.5 billion post-money mark, nearly tripling its valuation from May 2025.

Zoom in: Snorkel started as a data labeling software firm, but shifted to its data-as-a-service business about a year ago.

It sells complete, complex datasets and reinforcement-learning environments to help enterprises and frontier labs develop custom and agentic AI systems.

It has seen ARR grow about 18x in the last year and is near $375 million in ARR currently.

Snorkel's platform pairs human ⁠experts with thousands of specialized AI models and agents to create and vet the data.

State of play: Data demand has translated into hefty valuations for peers.

Mercor was reportedly in talks this summer to raise at a $20 billion valuation, while Meta's $14.3 billion investment into Scale AI valued it at more than $29 billion.

This interview has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Axios Pro: Why raise a massive round now?

Ratner: "We just saw this incredible growth. Candidly, the revenue run rate that we raised at was significantly less than the one that we're at today. Maybe we should have waited even longer, but again, it's good to leave some for the next round when you're trying to recruit as many people as we're trying to recruit.

The second thing was that we saw a real appetite in the space from investors, and it was kind of a preemptive round."

Was it difficult to differentiate yourself from your competitors while talking to investors?

"I've heard rumors that a lot of them are struggling to raise or have been for a while."

"One of the motivations of raising this kind of quantity of capital is because I think there's going to be a bunch of consolidation coming up in the space, and I want Snorkel to benefit from it.

There are great teams that are really good at one niche area of data, and would probably love to pair up with a research and technology-based team that has deep expert AI expertise like us. We think that's going to be a real factor coming up in the industry. There's been a boom of smaller entries into the data space. Kind of feels a little crypto-esque in some ways."

"The kind of companies and teams that have the kind of researchers and specialists who are really good at building data and simulation environments in specific domains is what's most interesting to us."

Snorkel AI will look to consolidate data sector

The San Francisco-based startup may look to swoop up niche data companies.

A man with short dark hair and round brown glasses stands by a window in an indoor concrete-walled space, wearing a light gray long-sleeve shirt and dark pants, smiling softly at the camera.

Snorkel AI plans to play offense as the data market consolidates, with fresh capital earmarked for M&amp;A, CEO Alex Ratner tells Axios Pro.The big picture: Demand for training and evaluation data has surged as AI systems grow more complex.

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Snorkel AI will look to consolidate data sector

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