Prolific, a London, UK-based provider of a platform that matches AI developers with engaged and verified people, raised £25M in funding.
The round was led by co-led by global tech investment specialist Partech and Oxford Science Enterprises (OSE).
The company intends to use the funds to further develop its AI proposition, including by further building specialised research groups which will be accessible via its platform.
Founded in 2014 by Phelim Bradley, CEO, Prolific offers access to over 120,000 active participants, enabling insights to be gathered swiftly from diverse and specialised groups. Its platform matches AI developers with engaged and verified people (not bots) to help improve and fine tune their AI applications, helping to address these concerns:
- Inaccuracy – ‘Hallucinations’, or confident but incorrect responses by AI systems, have the potential to derail public trust in the technology and dissuade businesses from adoption. Prolific enables a process called Reinforcement Learning by Human Feedback (RLHF) where the output from AI models is checked by human respondents to improve and train them.
- Bias – When it comes to data annotation, research has found that the demographics and backgrounds of annotators matters. With Prolific’s diverse and verified participants, AI models can be trained on truly representative population samples, reducing bias.
- Copyright – scraped or stolen data used to build or train AI applications is becoming an increasing concern. Prolific’s platform ensures clear auditing of sourced data, providing transparency that aligns with regulations proposed by the European Parliament.
Over 22,000 researchers have been active on the platform in the last year and a study is launched on Prolific every 3 minutes. The company now has more than 100 employees.
FinSMEs
14/07/2023