David AI Becomes the Go To Voice Data Partner for Leading AI Labs

A year ago, Tomer Cohen and Ben Wiley barely made the deadline to submit their Y Combinator application. Today, their startup David AI is emerging as one of the most important data providers in the fast-developing field of audio-based artificial intelligence.

The company announced a $25 million Series A funding round led by Alt Capital and Amplify Partners, with participation from First Round Capital, Y Combinator, BoxGroup, and a network of angel investors specializing in frontier audio research. The round values the company at north of $100 million, less than twelve months after it was founded.

David AI’s mission is rooted in a straightforward, but underserved problem in AI development: the shortage of high-quality training data for voice-based systems. “We started to think that the next phase of AI, the final evolution of AI, is where the AI moves out of the laptop and keyboard interface and into the real world,” Cohen, a former McKinsey analyst and chief of staff at Scale AI, told Forbes.

That idea laid the foundation for David AI, which today provides curated, multilingual, and metadata-rich audio datasets for AI labs developing voice models. Its core offering is paying people to read scripts or conduct conversations, and then meticulously recording, refining, and annotating that data.