Turing Secures $111M Funding, Doubles Valuation to $2.2B as Key AI Infrastructure Provider

Turing, a key coding provider for OpenAI and other LLM producers, raises $111M at a $2.2B valuation | TechCrunch

As AI companies race to improve the accuracy of Large Language Models and apps built on top of them, a startup that has emerged as a key partner in fulfilling that effort is announcing a significant round of funding to expand. Turing, which works with armies of engineers to contribute code to AI projects -- those projects include building LLMs for OpenAI and others, as well as Generative AI apps for enterprises -- has picked up a Series E of $111 million, doubling its valuation in the process to $2.2 billion. Turing makes around $167 million in ARR (annualized revenue run rate), and it is already profitable, CEO Jonathan Siddharth said in an interview with TechCrunch. The plan will be to use the funding to double down on expanding its business to more customers and to more use cases. Turing today says that it works with some 4 million coders around the world. Khazanah Nasional Berhad, Malaysia's sovereign wealth fund, is leading the round, with participation also from Westbridge Capital, Sozo Ventures, Uphonest Capital, AltaIR Capital, Amino Capital, Plug and Play, MVP Ventures, Fortius Ventures, Gaingels, and Mastodon Capital Management. Palo Alto-based Turing has raised $225 million to date. Turing's turn as a major partner to AI companies was not how the company got its start. Originally, it was, effectively, an HR tech startup. Specifically its early product was a platform for vetting and hiring remote-work coders, a business that started to take off during the Covid-19 pandemic with the world's growing appetite for better tools to source and work with remote teams. That business was strong enough to catapult the company to "unicorn" status. It was also strong enough to start catching a different kind of attention. As this story from Semafor last year recounts, Siddharth was summoned in 2022 to OpenAI for a meeting, which he thought would be to talk about recruiting engineers for the startup. Instead, it turned out to be a proposition. OpenAI researchers had discovered that code added into training datasets helped improve the model's reasoning capabilities, and it wanted Turing's help to generate that code. Siddharth obliged and that set off a whole new business focus for the startup, which he says now works with a number of foundational AI companies to provide similar services, as well as with companies that build apps on top of those LLMs. It hasn't been a pivot: Siddharth said that Turing still generates a substantial amount of revenue from its older business sourcing coding talent, although he would not disclose how much.

AI training data provider Turing closes $111M investment - SiliconANGLE

Turing Enterprises Inc., a provider of training data for artificial intelligence models, today announced that it has closed a $111 million funding round. Khazanah Nasional Berhad, Malaysia's sovereign wealth fund, led the Series E raise with participation from more than a half dozen other backers. Turing is now valued at $2.2 billion. Palo Alto, California-based Turing provides a service that enables AI providers to commission custom training datasets. At the start of a project, the company plans details such as the volume and complexity of data points an AI project requires. Turing then produces the records with help from a network of more than four million developers and other professionals. The company supplies data for several types of AI projects. Researchers can use Turing-provided datasets in projects that use RLHF, or reinforcement learning from human feedback. It's an AI development method that involves having human experts guide the model training process. According to Turing, its datasets are also useful for direct preference optimization. This is the process of more closely aligning an existing neural network with customer preferences. Turing promises to ease other AI development tasks as well. An offering called LLM Lab provides prepackaged software modules for common AI use cases. It includes, among others, AI agents that can generate coding advice and automate some customer support tasks. Another offering, ALAN, promises to speed up the process of fine-tuning LLMs for specific tasks. Companies can also use it to measure how fine-tuning a model increases its performance. Turing provides its data and AI development products alongside a broad suite of professional services. The company helps customers with tasks such as building new applications, moving existing workloads to the cloud and modernizing their interfaces. Turing can likewise manage ongoing application maintenance on enterprises' behalf. The company's customer base includes OpenAI, Anthropic PBC, Google LLC and other major players in the generative AI market. Turing says that its annualized recurring revenue has tripled over the past year to $300 million. Moreover, the company is profitable. "We've built a suite of products on top of the world's largest talent cloud to improve AI models and build applications on top of them," said Turning founder and Chief Executive Officer Jonathan Siddharth (pictured). Turing will invest the proceeds from its funding round in sales and marketing initiatives. Additionally, the company plans to expand the number of development tasks that its services can speed up.

OpenAI's Coding Provider Turing Raises $111 Million at $2.2 Billion Valuation

Palo Alto based AI coding provider Turing has raised $111 million in a Series E funding round, doubling its valuation to $2.2 billion, reported by TechCrunch first. The company, which supplies code for OpenAI and other AI firms, has seen rapid growth amidst the rise of several AI coding tools. "Excited to share that Turing has secured $111M in funding in a heavily oversubscribed round at a $2.2B valuation," wrote Turing CEO Jonathan Siddharth on Linkedin. "We're one of the fastest-growing AGI infrastructure companies in the world -- and we're profitable." The funding will support its work in AGI infrastructure, AI model development, and enterprise AI applications. Siddharth calls Turing 'an index bet on AGI.' The round was led by Malaysia's sovereign wealth fund, Khazanah Nasional Berhad, with investors including WestBridge Capital, Sozo Ventures, and Plug and Play. Based in Palo Alto, Turing has now raised a total of $225 million. "In 2018 Jonathan camped out in our Foundation Capital offices coding the early version of Turing - a solution to the engineering talent challenge he'd faced firsthand at his previous startup," said Ashu Garg, general partner at Foundation Capital. Turing's technology includes an AI-driven talent platform for vetting, matching, and managing engineers, ALAN for model evaluation, reinforcement learning, and agent development, and compute and data to support and improve AGI models. Originally launched as a remote hiring platform for engineers, Turing shifted focus in 2022 when OpenAI sought its help in generating code to improve AI model reasoning. Today, its focus includes reasoning, coding, multimodality, and industry-specific applications.