Total funding reaches $17.5M as the company launches Perle Labs, a platform that rewards users for reviewing and contributing accurate data sets to AI systems

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 7, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Perle, an AI training data platform powered by Web3 that brings human wisdom to AI models, today announced it has closed a $9 million seed round led by Framework Ventures. The round brings Perle’s total funding to $17.5 million across its seed and pre-seed rounds, marking a major milestone in the company’s growth and mission to improve how AI systems are trained and evaluated.

With this new capital, Perle will launch Perle Labs, a crypto-native ecosystem designed to transform how human input powers AI. By integrating blockchain infrastructure and incentive design, Perle Labs will provide transparent payments, on-chain attribution, and verifiable work histories—unlocking global participation and improving data quality at scale.

“As AI models grow more sophisticated, their success hinges on how well they handle the long tail of data inputs—those rare, ambiguous, or context-specific scenarios,” said Ahmed Rashad, CEO of Perle. “In our benchmarking, we’ve seen high-quality human-in-the-loop annotation outperform Amazon Rekognition by over 70%—proving that thoughtful human input is essential to closing critical data gaps. By decentralizing this process, we can unlock global participation, reduce bias, and dramatically improve model performance.”

While today’s AI models are only as good as the data they’re trained on, even the most advanced systems continue to struggle with complex, nuanced tasks. Perle Labs aims to address these limitations by expanding access to high-quality, diverse, and verified data sets, thus rewarding contributors, establishing on-chain proof of work, and empowering a global community to actively participate in shaping AI.

“We believe the pace of AI progress will be driven more by better data than by simply scaling models”, said Vance Spencer, Co-Founder of Framework Ventures. “That’s why we see a natural synergy between Perle’s powerful training platform and the transparent incentive structures enabled by crypto networks – together, they have the potential to kick off a flywheel that unlocks a wave of high-quality, useful data.”

Founded by AI veterans from Scale AI, Meta, MIT, and Berkeley, Perle combines human expertise with adaptive workflows to help teams collect, annotate, and evaluate specialized training data—faster and with higher accuracy. Its self-serve platform supports the full AI development lifecycle, including multimodal data collection (audio, image, video, etc.), reinforcement learning from human feedback (RLHF), and assistant fine-tuning. Perle is already supporting leading companies in scaling agentic training processes across complex use cases.

Perle’s latest funding round was led by Framework Ventures, a major crypto venture capital firm known for its early investments in key AI, DeFi, and blockchain infrastructure projects. Perle’s previous $8.5M seed round in October 2024 was led by CoinFund and included participation from Protagonist, HashKey, and Peer VC. With fresh capital and a growing network of partners, Perle is accelerating its vision to make high-quality human feedback the foundation of next-generation AI. As the boundaries of AI continue to evolve, Perle is committed to building the infrastructure that ensures progress is not just faster—but smarter, safer, and more inclusive.

About Perle
Perle transforms how AI teams access and use training data by combining human expertise with adaptive workflows. Specializing in data acquisition, expert annotation, and model evaluation, Perle delivers faster, more reliable results tailored for generative AI, LLMs, and RLHF. Our approach ensures data quality and context where it matters most-helping teams build smarter, more trustworthy AI. Learn more at Perle.ai.

About Framework Ventures
Framework Ventures is a prominent VC firm in the crypto industry, known for its early investments in several multi-billion dollar protocols across the DeFi and Web3 gaming industries. In 2022, the firm raised $400M for its third fund and has since significantly expanded into additional maturing verticals like Web3 gaming, real-world assets, and social crypto. To learn more, visit https://framework.ventures/.

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