Wirestock raises $23 million to scale AI data supply business

On Thursday, Wirestock announced it has raised $23 million in Series A funding to build out its data supply business. The funding round brings the startup’s total capital raised to about $26 million. The company, which currently employs 60 people, plans to use the new funding to hire for research, engineering, and product roles, and is building enterprise software for AI labs to collaborate on datasets.

The Series A round was backed by several investors:

• Nava Ventures (lead)
• SBVP
• Formula VC
• I2BF Ventures

The funding marks a significant expansion of a business model pivot that began in 2023. Wirestock previously operated as a stock photography marketplace, helping photographers distribute and sell their work on services like Shutterstock. It has since transitioned into a data provider, supplying multimodal data—which includes images, videos, design assets, and gaming and 3D content—to companies building large-scale AI models (foundation model makers). The platform has signed up more than 700,000 artists and designers who complete different tasks for data collection, similar to freelancers on platforms like Fiverr. This is a significant increase from 2022, when the platform had over 100,000 photographers.

According to co-founder and CEO Mikayel Khachatryan, Wirestock currently provides multimodal data to six of the largest foundation model makers. The company currently has an annual run-rate revenue of $40 million and has so far paid out $15 million to its contributors. Khachatryan noted that the company’s initial deals involved selling its existing library off the shelf, but the business shifted as it received custom requests for content and data. To support this transition, the startup retrained some of its teams to annotate and label data, and built sales and enterprise teams to pitch to hyperscalers—large cloud infrastructure providers—and secure creative assets like 3D modeling.

The demand for specialized datasets has placed Wirestock alongside data-supply competitors like Scale AI, Surge, Mercor, Micro1, Human Archive, and Human Native AI, which serve top AI model makers. Freddie Martignetti, founder of Nava Ventures, explained the investment thesis: “I think Wirestock has a deep understanding of what foundational models and hyperscalers need in terms of multimodal data to start creating more human-like systems. The cornerstone of our thesis was that multimodal data will be increasingly important, not just to create images or videos, but for models to complete real-world tasks,“

Why it matters

Wirestock’s transition from a stock photography marketplace to a specialized data provider highlights the intense demand for high-quality, multimodal datasets required to train foundation models.