-- BeatpulseLabs, a London-based AI data company turning expert human judgment into high-fidelity training datasets for the world's most advanced multimodal models, announced it raised $1.8 million in pre-seed funding led by Araya Ventures and Lighthouse Ventures, with participation from Alumni Ventures and Avalancha Ventures.
The announcement comes as BeatpulseLabs has witnessed 10x revenue growth over the first half of 2026, underscoring strong enterprise demand for high-fidelity, custom AI training datasets.
The emergence of enterprise-grade multimodal AI systems has created growing demand for data that reflects real-world complexity. As companies build increasingly sophisticated models, the limitation is no longer access to raw training data, but the ability to encode human judgement in the context of the specific use case. BeatpulseLabs is positioned to become the foundation data infrastructure layer targeting this gap.
Founded by Jason Rieff (South Africa) and Nikolay Vitanov (Bulgaria) the company addresses a growing challenge in artificial intelligence: most multimodal models are trained on poorly annotated data, limiting their ability to perform reliably in real-world environments.
Rieff and Vitanov came at the same problem from complementary ends.
Vitanov spent a decade in investment banking at Citigroup in London, covering tech and media across EMEA. As his clients raced to deploy AI, he saw the real bottleneck wasn’t the models. It was the data underneath them.
Rieff has led media teams since his early twenties - across Munich, Berlin and London, at Publicis Groupe and We Are Social. Working deep in content and data monetisation, he hit the "not fit for purpose" dataset problem first-hand.
The two met by chance in Cape Town in 2024. BeatpulseLabs had its first paying customer ninety days later and has been profitable from inception.
BeatpulseLabs combines two tightly integrated core offerings: dataset preparation and dataset provision. The company transforms existing multimedia content libraries into enterprise-grade training datasets by cleaning, structuring, labelling, validating, enriching, and formatting raw speech music and video assets for AI use. It also provides ready-made and custom, rights-cleared datasets for companies that need high-quality training data without starting from their own archive. The result is production-grade, context-rich data built for model training, fine-tuning, reinforcement learning and evaluation.
"BeatpulseLabs is tackling one of the most fundamental bottlenecks in Enterprise AI today: creating datasets beyond scale and general-purpose labelling, by embedding Subject Matter Expertise, product-specific workflows, and high-fidelity human judgement directly into the data that powers Enterprise AI models” says Mitul Ruparelia, General Partner at Araya Ventures.
“We are excited to co-lead this round. What Nikolay and Jason have built in such a short space of time is truly remarkable.” says Rupa Popat, Founder & Managing Partner at Araya Ventures.
While the funding provides additional firepower, the company positions the round as a strategic step rather than a capital necessity.
“AI models are only as capable as the data they are trained on,” said Jason Rieff, Cofounder of BeatpulseLabs. “Today, too much training data is generic, messy, and shallowly labelled, chosen because it’s easy to access rather than being fit for purpose. We’re building the missing data layer: transforming raw multimedia content into structured, annotated, model-ready datasets that help AI systems understand context, not just patterns. The old approach of throwing broad labels onto available content is no longer enough for the next generation of AI.“
About the company: BeatpulseLabs is building the data infrastructure layer for enterprise AI. The company transforms human intelligence, judgment, and taste into high-fidelity training datasets for frontier AI models, helping them perform in the most nuanced real-world domains where generic data falls short. By combining specialist subject matter experts with proprietary workflow software and exclusive multi-modal data, BeatpulseLabs creates the trusted data foundation powering the next generation of multimodal enterprise AI.
Contact Info:
Name: Lisa Winning
Email: Send Email
Organization: BeatpulseLabs
Website: https://beatpulselabs.com/
Release ID: 89194325
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