Micro1, a data labelling and training company, has raised $35 million in its Series A funding round at a valuation of $500 million, its founder Ali Ansari said on social media and company posts.

The funding round was led by venture capital firm 01A, said Ansari.

01A was founded by Dick Costolo and Adam Bain, the former CEO and COO of Twitter. As part of the transaction, Bain will join Micro1's board of directors.

The startup has partnered with major AI Labs and large corporations such as Microsoft, to train frontier LLMs (large language models).

"We’re just getting started building the infrastructure layer for AGI (artificial general intelligence), with the ultimate goal of answering the very fundamental question: “where should humanity spend its time?" said Ansari.

Ali also said in a post on Micro1 that the startup's ultimate mission is to build the world’s best human intelligence platform that will help every person match with the work they’ll find the most meaning in.

The data labeling companies came to the spotlight earlier in June after Meta's significant investment in Scale AI. 

The Head and Tale had done a quick overview about the data labeling companies beyond Scale AI. (Click here to read.)