CrowdFlower, the crowdsourcing start-up that aggregates online labour for data-crunching tasks, has tapped venture capitalists for a $5m Series A funding round.
Lukas Biewald, chief executive of the San Francisco company, said the money would fund expansion.
“We are creating a new global market that will make it possible for everyone in the world to do real, productive work at anytime, from anywhere,” he said.
CrowdFlower says it has completed more than 8m tasks in the past year and managed 125,000 workers across labour pools including casual gamers, refugees in Africa and users of Amazon’s Mechanical Turk.
The startup has developed an algorithm that it says ensures the quality and reliability of the work done by tens of thousands of individual workers over the web as they earn money cracking large but often basic tasks such as checking the accuracy of directories and whether unlawful copyrighted images are being posted to websites.
Trinity Ventures and Bessemer Venture Partners led the round, with investors from its $1.2m “angel” round also taking part.
