Encord Raises $60M Series C to Scale Data Infrastructure as Physical AI Demand Surges

New updates have been reported about Encord.

Encord has secured a $60 million Series C round led by Wellington Management, lifting its total funding to $110 million and positioning the company to scale its AI-native data infrastructure for physical AI systems. Existing backers including Y Combinator, CRV, N47, Crane Venture Partners, and Harpoon Ventures joined the round, alongside new investors Bright Pixel Capital and Isomer Capital, underscoring institutional confidence in Encord’s role as a core data layer for next-generation robotics and autonomy.

The company’s platform is built to manage, curate, annotate, and align multimodal data such as video, images, audio, sensor streams, and 3D point clouds, addressing a bottleneck that legacy data tools cannot handle at production scale. Encord now serves more than 300 AI teams globally, including Woven by Toyota, Zipline, Skydio, AXA Financial, and national security customers, and reports that data under management has expanded from 1 to over 5 petabytes in the past year, while revenue from physical AI customers has increased tenfold.

Management frames this expansion as a direct consequence of physical AI moving from pilots to production, with industry forecasts calling for over 400 million AI robots to come online in the next four years and the sector exceeding $30 billion in value. Co-founder and co-CEO Ulrik Stig Hansen emphasized that the constraint in physical AI is no longer model size but data readiness, arguing that even highly advanced models will underperform if the underlying proprietary sensor and telemetry data is incomplete or misaligned with real-world operating conditions.

Encord’s software is designed to act as a unified data layer across the AI lifecycle, from pre-training data generation and curation through human-in-the-loop alignment and evaluation, aiming to reduce tool fragmentation and operational friction for production teams. Customer feedback from users in critical infrastructure and defense indicates that the platform enables scalable geospatial and sensor workflows on a single stack, turning data operations into a competitive advantage rather than a cost center.

Co-founder and co-CEO Eric Landau stated that the new capital will accelerate product development and geographic expansion, with a focus on markets where physical AI deployment is ramping quickly, such as autonomous vehicles, drones, robotics, and industrial automation. Strategically, Encord is positioning itself as the standard infrastructure layer for physical AI data, seeking to lock in long-term enterprise relationships as customers’ data volumes compound and regulatory, safety, and reliability requirements tighten.

For executives and investors, the funding round and growth metrics signal that Encord is evolving from a developer-focused tooling provider into a scaled infrastructure partner whose revenue is increasingly tied to the broader adoption curve of physical AI. If industry projections hold and production deployments continue to rise, Encord’s exposure to petabyte-scale proprietary datasets and mission-critical workflows could deepen switching costs and support durable, high-margin growth, though it will face competition from both cloud hyperscalers and emerging data infrastructure startups.