Carbon Arc Launches AI Data Marketplace with $55M Seed Funding

Carbon Arc offers a marketplace for buying and selling licensed, real world transaction data to power LLMs and enterprise applications

Join our daily and weekly newsletters for the latest updates and exclusive content on industry-leading AI coverage. Learn More "Data is the new oil," an adage coined by British data scientist Clive Humby back in the distant year 2006, has only gained in popularity in the last few years thanks to the generative AI boom. But if that's true, why can't you buy and sell data as easily as you could barrels of crude, as the commodity, as so many companies and people conceive of it? Instead, we're undergoing years of court battles and well reported pieces documenting how AI providers (among other companies) have scraped the web for their data in apparent disregard, and potential violation, of copyright. Shouldn't there be a "one-stop shop" for companies to buy clean, fully licensed data and use it to power their business models and applications -- a kind of iTunes for data, or Amazon for data? That's the thinking behind Carbon Arc, a new startup emerging from stealth today with $55 milllion in seed funding led by Liberty City Ventures, with participation from K5 Global, Raptor Group, and Wasserman Media GroupAI Data Utility and real-time Insights Exchange. It's designed to help businesses consume, trade, and integrate structured intelligence without the inefficiencies of traditional data acquisition. The company was founded in March 2021 with a simple but ambitious idea: "For all the data that exists in the world, very little of it makes it into the hands of decision-makers," said Kirk McKeown, Carbon Arc's Co-founder and CEO, in an interview with VentureBeat conducted in a cafe in New York City last week. Carbon Arc is addressing that problem by transforming unstructured, siloed datasets into AI-ready insights. Through its proprietary ontology framework, the platform standardizes private data and makes it available on demand -- offering an alternative to bulk data contracts that often leave enterprises paying for information they don't fully use. Freeing trapped, real world transaction, behavioral and sentiment data While data is everywhere, much of it remains trapped within corporate balance sheets, enterprise silos, and legacy systems. McKeown describes it as "private data is locked on every balance sheet in the world. The economy generates enormous exhaust -- receipt data, healthcare claims, trade claims, credit cards -- but it's not flowing to decision-makers." At the same time, AI-driven enterprises are facing a shrinking pool of usable public data. With large language models (LLMs) rapidly depleting public datasets, businesses must seek out differentiated, proprietary intelligence to remain competitive. "More data means better questions," McKeown said. "The big players are going to need more and more differentiated data assets as they come to market." Carbon Arc's solution is to treat data like a financial asset, creating a structured market for data the way equities, bonds, and derivatives trade today. This shift introduces price discovery, demand discovery, and real-time access -- bringing liquidity to a historically illiquid data economy. "The intelligence age should be no different from past revolutions -- every major technology shift in history has required a transformation in the underlying feedstock for power," McKeown added. How Carbon Arc's data marketplace works Carbon Arc has built a two-sided marketplace where data owners contribute their datasets, and businesses pay per-megabyte for the insights they use. While consumption-based pricing provides flexibility, it can also be difficult to manage. "Consumption-based pricing is a great trade, but it scares people because it's hard to manage," McKeown admitted. To address this, Carbon Arc is introducing a wallet structure that gives customers better control over their spending. Already powering enterprises across sectors The platform is already being leveraged across multiple industries: A clean and easy-to-navigate user interface with automatic dashboards and charts Carbon Arc's platform is designed for ease of use, with interactive data visualizations, API connectivity, and real-time intelligence streaming. Key Interface Features: For retailers, the platform provides real-time comparisons of market share, sales trends, and consumer behavior across competitors like Lululemon, American Eagle, and Abercrombie & Fitch. In enterprise analytics, users can track spending trends across major retailers like Walmart, Kroger, and Target -- enabling data-driven merchandising and pricing strategies. What it means for developers and data decision-makers Software developers and data scientists often face significant challenges when dealing with unstructured data. Carbon Arc simplifies this process by automatically structuring raw data, providing real-time insights via API, and eliminating the need for extensive preprocessing. Instead of committing to bulk data contracts, businesses can consume only the insights they need, reducing operational overhead and budget constraints. Key benefits include: "AI predictions will only get better over time, but they will always need historical data as a foundation," McKeown explained, stating that Carbon Arc has data going back centuries, yet continuously adds new updates on a weekly or daily basis, depending on the specific segment. Additionally, the company ensures its data is backed up in multiple locations. "We're maniacal about redundancy," McKeown told me. "I never want to be leveraged by a single data provider -- we have multiple sources to protect against pricing hikes or supply disruptions." Turning data from a research product into a tradable asset McKeown sees Carbon Arc's platform as part of a larger shift in how data is valued and exchanged. "We're building a market for data the way equities, bonds, and derivatives trade today -- bringing price discovery and demand discovery into a structured exchange." This fundamental shift in data economics could reshape AI, finance, and business intelligence, making real-time insights more accessible and cost-effective. With $55 million in funding, Carbon Arc is well-positioned to redefine how enterprises access, trade, and integrate intelligence. By turning data into a fluid, tradable asset, the company is addressing one of the biggest challenges in AI and business decision-making today -- ensuring that data is no longer locked away, but actively driving insights and innovation.

Carbon Arc reels in $56M for its AI data platform - SiliconANGLE

Carbon Arc Inc., a startup that provides data for artificial intelligence models, has raised $56 million in funding to finance growth initiatives. The company announced the investment today. Liberty City Ventures led the round with participation from K5 Global, Raptor Group and Wasserman Media Group. Sourcing data for AI projects involves multiple challenges. Developers must either create the data from scratch, which can be prohibitively expensive, or find organizations that possess the needed information. If a company opts for the latter route, it has to sign licensing agreements with each of the organizations from which it plans to source records. New York-based Carbon Arc is working to ease the data procurement process. The company operates a cloud service, Insights Exchange, that offers datasets optimized for AI use. The platform launched this morning in conjunction with Carbon Arc's funding announcement. Insights Exchange allows companies to purchase datasets under a consumption-based pricing model. According to Carbon Arc, that arrangement is simpler than signing licensing agreements with multiple data suppliers. Insights Exchange currently offers access to several petabytes' worth of information from multiple sectors. Besides streamlining procurement, Carbon Arc also eases the task of preparing data for processing. Datasets sourced from different sources are often formatted in different ways, which can complicate analysis. Carbon Arc says that its platform organizes information into a structured, standardized format to speed up processing. One of the ways Insights Exchange speeds up data preparation is by providing a so-called unified ontology. The feature helps AI models determine when datasets contain fields that are formatted differently, but contain the same type of information. For example, purchase log collections from two competing e-commerce stores might both have columns that display the ten largest transactions. Insights Exchange enables users to interact with the information it hosts in multiple ways. A query tool makes it possible to find records that describe a specific sector, company or product. A restaurant chain, for example, could surface AI training datasets that contain information about competitors. Alongside the query tool, Carbon Arc provides dozens of prepackaged graphs that visualize the data to ease analysis. "We are building the exchange that turns data into a liquid, tradable asset," said Carbon Arc co-founder and Chief Executive Officer Kirk McKeown. "We're unlocking private data, turning it into insights, and getting it into the hands of decision-makers who need it."