DURHAM – CloudFactory, a startup focusing on labor management using artificial intelligence, has landed $65 million in growth equity funding.

The Durham-based company announced today that it secured the funding from FTV Capital, with participation from Weatherford Capital.

It said it plans to invest in three core areas: workforce development, global market awareness and business development, and technology advancement.

“As AI technology continues to grow rapidly, the need for high-quality data to feed complex AI systems is crucial,” said Alex Mason, FTV Capital partner, in a statement.

“CloudFactory is poised for tremendous growth across many industry verticals where executives are clamoring for data labeling capabilities that meet superior quality standards and are consistently delivered.”

Launched in 2011 at Techcrunch Disrupt, CloudFactory is billed as a successor to “crowdsourcing,” combining people and technology to deliver “high-quality data” to businesses of all sizes, from startups to large enterprises.

CloudFactory CEO and founder Mark Sears.

The company already has some 5,000-plus underemployed “cloud workers,” and maintains offices in Nepal, Kenya, United Kingdom, as well as Durham.

The workforce has been trained on and uses over 100 different annotation tools – including proprietary tools and those available through CloudFactory’s partnerships with technology providers such as Hivemind, Onepanel, Deepen and Dataloop.

The ultimate mission: to put one million people to work through its platform.

According to its founder and CEO Mark Sears, the startup is well on its way to fulfilling this goal with this latest injection of funds.

“We’ve just seen a huge demand in the market obviously around the development of AI, and getting high-quality training data scale. The market opportunity is really what we’re focusing on,” he told WRAL TechWire, ahead of the announcement.

He added: “The future of AI and machine learning innovation will be driven by people, and we believe our focus on people has been the biggest contributor to our growth,” he said.

As part of the transaction, FTV Capital partner Alex Mason and principal Abhay Puskoor and Weatherford Capital partner Sam Weatherford will join the CloudFactory board of directors.