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Trajectory raises $45 million Series A at $300 million valuation
One-year-old AI startup Trajectory said it raised $45 million led by Sequoia at a $300 million valuation, TechCrunch reported.
- Our desk updated its story
- New headline Was: “Trajectory raises $45 million Series A at $300 million valuation”
- Our desk updated its story
Trajectory, a roughly one-year-old startup, said it raised $45 million in Series A funding at a $300 million valuation for software that retrains AI models from user feedback, TechCrunch reported Monday1.
Sequoia led the round, with participation from Nvidia, Bessemer Venture Partners and Bain Capital Ventures, according to the report1. The 18-person company was founded by Stanford classmates Ronak Malde, Michael Elabd and Arjun Karanam, who have worked at Google DeepMind and Apple1.
TechCrunch said businesses often fine-tune general models for fields such as law and finance by hiring research staff or consultants known as forward-deployed engineers1. Trajectory said customers can start with an open-source model, connect the platform to their applications, collect performance feedback and retrain the model over time1.
Malde told TechCrunch that lawyers, doctors and other specialists can improve models themselves, which the company said could make specialized AI cheaper to deploy1. Named customers include Harvey, Rogo, Decagon, Mercor and Nvidia; the company said it is making the post-training platform publicly available1.
Elabd said keeping humans in the training loop is safer than fully autonomous self-improvement1. Trajectory named Thinking Machines Lab, Applied Compute and Prime Intellect as competitors1. Malde said he was among researchers Google DeepMind acqui-hired from Windsurf; Karanam previously worked on generative models at Apple1.
