What Sama does

Sama (legally Samasource Impact Sourcing, Inc.) is a San Francisco-based AI training data company that provides expert-led data annotation, validation, and evaluation services for machine learning models across image, video, 3D point cloud, text, audio, and structured data modalities. Founded in 2008 and rebranded from Samasource to Sama, the company operates a platform-plus-modules architecture anchored by Sama Annotate (expert annotation), Sama Validate (human-in-the-loop model prediction correction), Sama GenAI (generative AI and LLM services including RLHF and RAG evaluation), and Sama Curate (data curation). The platform is supported by proprietary quality, collaboration, and analytics layers: SamaAssure (written quality guarantees up to 99.5%), SamaHub (project management workspace), and Sama IQ (proactive edge-case and data distribution analytics). Recent additions Sama Automate, Bulk Annotation, and Smart Review embed ML automation into the human-in-the-loop workflow to reduce cost and rework.

Sama employs a full-time in-house workforce of over 4,000 data experts (pre-April 2026 layoffs of approximately 1,100 Nairobi employees following Meta contract termination) with delivery centers in Kenya and Uganda and R&D presence in Montr\u00e9al. The company sells exclusively through direct enterprise sales with multi-year contracts and quote-based pricing, targeting Fortune 500 customers across ADAS and autonomous vehicles, banking and financial services, consumer tech and media, retail and e-commerce, agriculture, and robotics. Notable enterprise customers include Microsoft, Google, Walmart, Continental, Siemens, Qualcomm, Sony, Verizon, NASA, eBay, Getty Images, SWIFT, and Bird, with an 8-year average customer tenure, 92% CSAT, and NPS of 64 reported for 2024.

Sama monetizes primarily through managed data annotation services, data validation services, model evaluation services for foundation models, and custom professional services, supplemented by its pre-annotated Sama-Coco dataset. The company is Certified B Corp, holds ISO 9001, ISO 27001, TISAX, and EU GDPR compliance, and is pursuing ISO 42001 and SOC-2 certifications. The company has raised approximately $84.8 million across disclosed funding rounds, with the most recent being a $70 million Series B led by CDPQ in November 2021. Its strategic positioning as a premium, ethically-sourced alternative to crowdsourced annotation platforms is reinforced by its labor impact metrics (65,000-69,000+ lives impacted).

Name

Sama

Legal name

Samasource Impact Sourcing, Inc.

Website

https://sama.com

Company type

Private

Founded year

2008

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

11–50 employees

Short description

Sama is a San Francisco-based AI training data company that delivers expert-led annotation, validation, and evaluation services for image, video, 3D, text, audio, and multimodal models, serving enterprise customers such as Microsoft, Google, Walmart, and Continental through a full-time in-house workforce of over 4,000.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

AI Training Data and Annotation Services

NAICS

Software Publishers (5132), Software Publishers (513210)

SIC

Services-Computer Processing & Data Preparation (7374), Services-Computer Programming, Data Processing, Etc. (7370)

akta.pro primary industry

Annotation Tooling & Workflow Management (HDAAALAC)

akta.pro secondary industry

RLHF, Human Feedback & Evaluation Data Tools (HDAAALAJ)

Keywords

• Data annotation services
• AI training data
• Computer vision annotation
• Data labeling platform
• Generative AI services

Headquarters

HQ city

San Francisco

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices4 records

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Services

Cost components

Personnel, Operations, Technology or R&D, Marketing or Sales, Infrastructure

Revenue model

1. Managed Data Annotation Services: Core revenue stream from providing expert-led annotation services for computer vision, NLP, and multimodal AI. Services include image annotation, video annotation, 3D point cloud annotation, and text annotation. Delivered through full-time in-house workforce with quality guarantees.
2. Data Validation Services: Human-in-the-loop review and correction of model predictions to improve ML model accuracy. Includes quality control and delivery of corrected training data.
3. Model Evaluation Services: Evaluation and scoring of real-world model performance to guide retraining, iteration, and deployment. Includes conversational AI, image/video captioning, LLM optimization, document summarization, RAG evaluation, and synthetic data validation.
4. Professional Services: Custom services for processes, model architecture, performance targets, and production constraints. Includes consultation, integration, and custom workflow design.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion2 records

Distribution channels3 records

Marketing channels8 records

Core offering

Sama provides expert-led, human-verified data annotation, validation, and model evaluation services for AI and machine learning. The company combines a full-time in-house workforce of 4,000+ trained annotators with proprietary ML-assisted tooling (SamaAssure, Sama Hub, Sama IQ, Auto QA) to deliver labeled image, video, 3D point cloud, text, and multimodal data for enterprise AI development at production scale.

Product overview

Sama operates as a data annotation and validation platform provider offering a unified platform-plus-modules architecture. The core platform comprises four integrated products: Sama Annotate (expert-led annotation for image, video, and 3D point cloud data), Sama Validate (human-in-the-loop model prediction correction), Sama GenAI (generative AI and LLM services including model evaluation, RLHF, and synthetic data), and Sama Curate (data curation). These are supported by platform-level features including SamaAssure (quality guarantee up to 99.5%), SamaHub (project management and reporting workspace), and SamaIQ (proprietary analytics and insights engine). Recent product additions include Sama Automate (AI+human-in-the-loop automation), Bulk Annotation (ML-powered batch classification), and Smart Review (selective quality review reducing review rates to 10%). Specialized offerings include ADAS & Autonomous Vehicles, Generative AI for BFSI, Consumer & Media, Agriculture & Food, and Robotics & Manufacturing industry solutions.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• Sama Annotate Expert-led data annotation solution for image, video, and 3D point cloud data, featuring ML-assisted annotation, bounding boxes, polygons, keypoints, cuboids, and multi-level quality management with AutoQA to deliver a 99% client acceptance rate at production scale. Targeted at enterprise AI teams building computer vision models.
• Sama Validate Managed service for human-in-the-loop review and correction of machine learning model predictions across 3D point cloud, video, and image data, enabling enterprises to improve models with custom workflows and on-demand reporting. Targeted at ML teams needing model output validation.
• Sama GenAI Generative AI and LLM services including model validation, instruction following, preference ranking (RLHF), image and video captioning, creative writing, and synthetic data creation to build and launch accurate generative AI models faster with human-in-the-loop expertise. Targeted at AI labs and foundation-model developers.
• Sama Curate Data curation tool for organizing, managing, and preparing datasets for AI model training, supporting the full data pipeline from ingestion to delivery. Targeted at data and ML teams assembling training datasets.
• 3D Point Cloud Annotation LiDAR and Radar 3D data annotation with fused sensor architecture, 3D-to-2D projection, world coordinate conversion, automatic ground detection, custom intensity values, and cuboid, bounding box, polygon, keypoint, and line annotations for autonomous vehicle perception models. Targeted at automotive and robotics perception teams.
• Video Annotation Scalable video annotation services with object detection, segmentation, tracking, temporal segmentation, spatial object tracking, and pose identification across frames using linear interpolation, ML-assisted tools, and bounding box, polygon, and keypoint annotations. Targeted at computer vision teams building video understanding models.
• Image Annotation Image annotation supporting bounding boxes, polygons, keypoints, lines, arrows, and cuboids for object detection, semantic segmentation, instance segmentation, pose detection, and scene categorization with ML-assisted auto-annotation and crosshair tool. Capacity of 300 million frames per month. Targeted at computer vision model developers.
• Model Evaluation Foundation model evaluation services including conversational AI, image and video captioning, LLM optimization, document summarization, RAG evaluation, and synthetic data validation to score real-world model performance and guide retraining and iteration. Targeted at AI labs building generative AI and foundation models.
• Sama Automate Data automation platform combining AI automation with human-in-the-loop validation for AI model training data annotation, delivering a 40% reduction in annotation time with a goal of 10x reduction, targeting retail, automotive, and finance sectors.
• Sama-Coco Dataset Pre-annotated dataset offering combining Sama's annotation quality with COCO format data, available as a resource for AI model training and benchmarking. Targeted at computer vision researchers and developers needing ready-to-use labeled data.
• Professional Services Custom services tailored to client processes, model architecture, performance targets, and production constraints, including dedicated team matching, agile workflow adaptation, and edge-case dataset expertise. Targeted at enterprise AI teams with specialized annotation requirements.

Quantifiable outcome

• 99% first-batch client acceptance rate across 10B points per month
• +8 more outcomes

Named customers14 records

Segments7 records

Ideal customer profiles5 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

Yes

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

AI capability13 records

Feature8 records

Partnerships

One partnership is on record.

• Mila (Montréal Institute for Learning Algorithms)coreStrategic or Co-development Partner · 4 November 2021Strategic partnership leveraging Montréal's strong AI ecosystem. Sama aimed to grow its Montréal team to leverage Mila's research capabilities and the broader AI community in the region.

Scale indicators16 records

Recent moves8 records

Expansion highlights6 records

Direct peers

• Scale AI: Scale AI is the leading AI training data platform offering data annotation, evaluation, and fine-tuning services to enterprise and government customers including many of the same Fortune 500 buyers (Microsoft, Meta, autonomous vehicle OEMs) that Sama serves.
• Appen: Appen is a global data annotation and crowdsourcing company serving the same ML training data market across image, text, audio, and video modalities, with comparable enterprise sales motion and similar multinational customer base as Sama.
• Labelbox: Labelbox provides a data-centric AI platform combining annotation tooling with managed labeling services, directly competing with Sama Annotate, Sama Hub, and Sama Validate for enterprise ML team budgets.
• CloudFactory: CloudFactory offers managed data annotation and AI workforce solutions using a global team model analogous to Sama's in-house workforce approach, targeting computer vision and NLP use cases for enterprise customers.
• Surge AI: Surge AI is a data labeling platform specializing in high-quality RLHF and human preference data for foundation models, directly competing with Sama's GenAI and RLHF offerings in the post-training market.
• SuperAnnotate: SuperAnnotate provides an AI annotation platform with both self-service tooling and managed services for image, video, and text labeling, overlapping with Sama's core annotation and platform capabilities.
• Datasaur: Datasaur offers an NLP-focused data labeling platform with LLM-assisted annotation features, competing with Sama's text annotation and GenAI service line for natural language AI customers.
• Toloka AI: Toloka AI offers crowdsourced data labeling and GenAI evaluation services across text, image, and multimodal data, competing with Sama on both managed annotation services and foundation model evaluation.

Emerging players

• Snorkel AI: Snorkel AI applies programmatic labeling and weak supervision to reduce manual annotation needs, positioning as a complementary/competing approach to Sama's human-in-the-loop managed services for data-centric AI workflows.
• Encord: Encord provides a data-centric AI platform for image and video annotation with active learning features, competing in the same computer vision annotation segment as Sama Annotate.

Market position

Strengths4 records

Weaknesses4 records

Competitive moat6 records

Key risks5 records

Key highlights6 records

Customer concentration

• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/sama-ai
• Xx.com/SamaAI
• Facebookfacebook.com/samaartificialintelligence

Compliance6 records

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles7 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds3 records

Investors8 records

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Sama