Centific Secures $60M Series A Funding to Expand AI Data Foundry Services

Centific, a Seattle-area AI services startup and Nvidia partner, lands $60M

Centific, a Redmond, Wash.-based startup founded in 2020 that helps organizations manage data pipelines to power advanced AI systems, raised $60 million in a Series A round led by Singaporean venture capitalist Jenny Lee of Granite Asia. Centific describes itself as the "hidden infrastructure behind world-class AI models," helping provide the foundational data pipelines for organizations pushing AI into production. The startup works with global leaders in smartphones, tablets, e-commerce, and software; it also collaborates with Nvidia, Microsoft, AWS, and other giants. "Enterprises globally are moving from AI experimentation to enterprise-wide deployment, but the journey requires scale, trust, and deep integration with legacy systems," Lee said in a statement. "Centific is built for this moment." Centific is led by CEO and co-founder Venkat Rangapuram, who previously worked at Pactera, HCL America, and Infosys. "AI is evolving from isolated models to fully agentic systems that perceive, reason, and act at scale," Rangapuram said in a statement. "Our full-stack Data Foundry meets this moment by combining deep domain expertise, human-in-the-loop assurance, and true multimodal orchestration -- all delivered with unmatched speed and scale." Centific originally started as the U.S. division of Pactera, a China-based IT consulting company, according to Fortune. The company has nearly 3,000 employees, with a majority of its workforce in India, according to LinkedIn.

Singapore VC Granite Asia leads $60 million funding round for AI 'data foundry' Centific to fund global expansion

The "AI data foundry" Centific closed a $60 million Series A funding round led by the Singapore-based venture fund Granite Asia, as the U.S.-based startup explores an ambitious expansion to Asia. AI startups are now paying close attention to Asia as they search for new markets for their AI models. Local AI developers, such as China's DeepSeek, are showing that Asian AI models are sitting on the technological frontier. "This funding round isn't about necessity; it's about ambition," CEO Venkat Rangapuram said in a statement. "This investment turbocharges our mission: to empower enterprises with AI systems that are resilient, agile and meticulously fine-tuned." Centific plans to use the funds to expand the functionality of its platform, improve its research and development, and deepen its collaboration with partners like Nvidia, Microsoft, and Lenovo. The AI startup works with larger businesses to develop, train, and deploy their AI, including trying to eliminate bias, hallucinations, and other mistakes. "Unless the model is grounded in very specific scenarios and data sets, it can't really solve enterprise-related issues," Rangapuram said in a conversation with Fortune. "There's a whole lot of things that need to be thought about before you can go live in an enterprise setup." Centific started as the U.S. division of Pactera, a Chinese IT consulting and outsourcing firm. After Chinese Electronics Corporation, a Chinese state-owned company, acquired Pactera in 2020, it carved out the U.S. business, which eventually became an independent company. Rangapuram told Fortune that he was excited about the "disruptive and exciting possibilities" of physical AI, particularly in ASEAN and Singapore. ("Physical AI" are models designed to work with real-world machinery, like manufacturing equipment.) "The future is not just in North America, it's global," he said. The wish to expand to new markets was why Centific turned to Granite Asia and famed venture capitalist (and MPW Asia finalist) Jenny Lee, one of the fund's senior managing partners. Rangapuram pointed to Granite's "network and resources within Asia and India" as part of the reason why he turned to Lee and her fund "as we diversify from the North American market into alternate markets around the globe." Granite Asia, in turn, sees the Centific investment as part of its mission to build "enduring infrastructure for the future of industry," Lee said in a statement accompanying the funding announcement. Centific "is uniquely positioned to become a foundational partner in the enterprise AI stack." Granite Asia was born from GGV Capital, a venture giant with deep roots in Asia. Lee set up GGV's first China office in 2005, and backed giants like Alibaba, Grab, and Xiaomi. Yet in 2023, following U.S. Congressional scrutiny of venture investments in China, GGV decided to split itself into two, with its Asia-based business becoming Granite Asia. The fund has quickly built new relationships across the region. Late last year, it formed a strategic partnership with the Indonesia Investment Authority, one of Indonesia's sovereign wealth funds, to deploy $1.2 billion into investment opportunities. In March, it announced a new joint venture with Japanese private equity firm Integral to pool together $100 million into Japan's tech sector. Then on Tuesday, Granite Asia was one of two foreign VCs, alongside Taiwan's AppWorks, selected to take part in a new Malaysian initiative to invest in local startups and encourage global companies to redomicile in the Southeast Asian country. "We always felt there was a lack of capital focus in Asia towards Asia companies," Lee told Fortune in late October. "Our vision is to become the dominant capital platform for startups, founders, and businesses across the region: capital for the region that's anchored in the region."

AI data foundry provider Centific lands $60M to grow enterprise footprint

AI data foundry provider Centific lands $60M to grow enterprise footprint Artificial intelligence data foundry company Centific Global Solutions Inc. has raised $60 million in new funding from Jenny Lee of Granite Asia Management Pte. Ltd. The company plans to use the funding, announced Tuesday, to scale up its AI infrastructure platform, enhance research and development for safe multimodal AI and expand enterprise partnerships globally. Founded in 2020, Centific offers an AI data foundry, a platform that provides the tools, infrastructure and human expertise needed to collect, curate and refine high-quality data for training, fine-tuning and safely deploying AI models at large scale. Centific's frontier AI data foundry supports centralized orchestration of datasets and workflows, including supervised fine-tuning, reinforcement learning from human feedback, red-teaming and synthetic data generation. It offers modular tools such as AI Workbench, Data Studio, RAG Studio and Safe AI Studio. The company's platform is built to operate across cloud, on-premises, edge and hybrid environments, with Centific leveraging Databricks and Nvidia Corp.'s CUDA-accelerated computing. The platform integrates tightly with Nvidia's edge hardware to offer robust infrastructure flexibility and secure, scalable deployment options. The platform also offers a plugin-based architecture to allow customers to mix and match components such as model catalogs and data marketplaces under platform-as-a-service or software-as-a-service metering models. The company also maintains a global network of more than 1.8 million domain experts, including Ph.D.s, data scientists and vertical specialists, who supervise data labeling, validate datasets and work to reduce bias and hallucinations. The platform can also generate synthetic data to fill gaps when real-world data is scarce, helping clients in privacy-sensitive or regulated sectors bypass data scarcity and compliance issues. Though Centific is not a household name or even particularly well-known outside the AI community, its customers need little introduction. They include OpenAI, Anthropic PBC, xAI Inc., Mistral AI SAS, Microsoft Corp., Google LLC, Dell Technologies Inc., Lenovo Group Ltd., Nvidia and Amazon Web Services Inc. "This funding round isn't about necessity, it's about ambition," Chief Executive Venkat Rangapuram said in a statement. "Having trained most [of] the world's leading AI models, our Zero Distance Innovation ethos now pivots to enterprise impact, unlocking industries' ability to deploy safe, scalable AI at speed and scale."