General Catalyst Backs Coding Data Startup Proximal As It Reaches Revenue Milestone

It’s no secret that leading AI developers are on the hunt for data to improve their models, especially in lucrative areas like software engineering. The insatiable appetite for data has lifted a whole host of so-called data labeling or data curation startups, including older ones like Scale and Surge and newer ones such as Fleet and Micro1.

The latest beneficiary is San Francisco-based Proximal, which is coming out of stealth with $15 million in seed funding led by General Catalyst at a $300 million valuation, the company told The Information exclusively. 

Proximal raised its seed round at the end of last year, when it was generating a negligible amount of revenue, co-founder and CEO Calvin Chen said. Chen had cofounded the 40-person startup last fall with his roommate Justus Mattern, who previously worked at compute startup Prime Intellect, which itself is only two years old.

Now, just 10 months later, the company has surpassed $200 million in annualized revenue, he said. (Proximal calculates annualized revenue by taking the revenue generated in the quarter so far and multiplying it by four, Chen said.)