Centific, the Washington based AI “data foundry” company, just raised $60 million in Series A funding to expand its AI infrastructure platform, in a round led by Granite Asia.
While the company may operate mostly out of sight, its work is behind some of the most advanced AI systems in use today. Since its founding in 2020, Centific has been a critical development and deployment partner for organizations including OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, Nvidia, Anthropic, and Amazon Web Services. Its software and global network support high-precision model training, human-in-the-loop validation, and multimodal deployment at production scale.
The fresh capital, they say, will be used to enhance Centific’s platform capabilities, deepen partnerships with cloud and hardware providers, and expand its global footprint. But beyond growth, the company sees this moment as an opportunity to set the pace for how agentic and domain-specific AI systems are responsibly built and scaled.
Centific’s core product is an AI Data Foundry: an infrastructure-agnostic platform built to accelerate the lifecycle of AI systems. This includes data curation and refinement, supervised training, reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), red-teaming, synthetic data generation, and real-time inferencing. The platform is built for deployment across cloud, on-premise, and edge environments, using a plugin-based system that supports both PaaS and SaaS metering.
Modular tools like Data Studio, RAG Studio, and Safe AI Studio allow customers to mix and match components to meet specific use cases. For example, in regulated sectors where access to real-world data is limited, Centific’s synthetic data capabilities help fill the gap without compromising on compliance. The company’s global network of 1.8 million domain experts supports tasks like data labeling, model validation, and bias reduction, adding human assurance at every stage.
A Platform Built for Real-World AI
As AI evolves towards autonomous, agentic systems that reason and act across real environments, Centific is positioning its platform as the connective tissue between high-performance AI and enterprise operations.
The platform integrates tightly with hardware providers like Nvidia and software stacks from Microsoft and Databricks. It also features NVIDIA’s NIM microservices and Metropolis architecture, allowing for low-latency inferencing in real-time video, audio, and sensor-rich environments. This flexibility has led to deployments in sectors such as public safety, manufacturing, and global content operations.
Strategic partnerships are also playing a key role. In March, Centific teamed up with edge intelligence firm mimik to develop smart space solutions that dynamically distribute AI workloads across edge and cloud infrastructure. This month, it partnered with Virtue AI to bring real-time policy enforcement and multimodal safety tooling into its platform: critical for customers deploying AI in sensitive environments or under emerging regulatory frameworks.
Competing Below the Surface
Its rivals include Scale AI in data labeling, Databricks in orchestration and tooling, and hyperscalers like AWS and Azure in infrastructure. Yet Centific’s integrated model (combining orchestration, domain-specific data services, compliance, and deployment support) has made it an appealing one-stop solution for foundational model builders and enterprises.
Rather than selling isolated tools, Centific’s offering is designed to span the AI development lifecycle.
“This funding round isn’t about necessity,” CEO, Venkat Rangapuram said in a statement. “It’s about ambition. 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.”
Rangapuram cited interest in “physical AI” applications (AI embedded in machines and systems in the manufacturing and public sector) as a key reason for tapping Granite’s Asia-based network.
The venture firm has already partnered with entities like the Indonesia Investment Authority and Japan’s Integral private equity firm to direct capital into the region. For Centific, this opens access to new customers and governments seeking sovereign, secure AI systems.
With AI development shifting rapidly toward agentic models that act autonomously across domains, Centific’s value proposition is becoming more timely. Its platform supports the full continuum: from data readiness and model safety to inferencing and continuous monitoring. That scope, combined with its traction among leading AI labs and hyperscalers, makes it a potential keystone in the evolving enterprise AI stack.
