CrowdFlower raises 10 million from Microsoft and others to bring A.I. to data science

CrowdFlower, a crowdsourced data-cleaning and tagging platform, has closed a fresh 10 million in funding in a round led by Microsoft Ventures, Canvas Ventures, and Trinity Ventures. Founded out of San Francisco in 2009, CrowdFlower had previously raised 28 million, including a 12.5 million round back in 2014, but the company says it will use its cash influx to expedite the adoption of a new machine-learning product called CrowdFlower AI. CrowdFlower will use a combination of humans and artificial intelligence to "make data useful" by helping teams organize their data more effectively at scale. For example, a company may have a large database of numbers and demographics, but some fields might be empty, incorrect, or incomplete -- something that a human is best placed to fix. So when a company uploads its data into CrowdFlower and stipulates the rules, humans from around the world link in and do the labeling manually.