Amsterdam-based Toloka, a provider of high-quality data solutions for artificial intelligence (AI), has secured a $72M (approximately €64M) strategic investment led by Bezos Expeditions, the investment firm of Amazon founder Jeff Bezos.
Bezos Expeditions is the personal investment firm of Jeff Bezos, founder of Amazon.com. The firm manages a portfolio of investments across various sectors, including technology, healthcare, and space exploration.
The funding round also includes participation from Mikhail Parakhin, Chief Technology Officer of Shopify, who will join Toloka’s Board of Directors as Executive Chairman.
Mikhail Parakhin, incoming Executive Chairman of Toloka, adds, “The demand for world-class AI data expertise is more urgent than ever. Toloka is uniquely positioned to meet this need, distinguished by its excellent engineering, strong research reputation, and proven ability to blend ML expertise with managing humans at scale and with scientific rigor. I’m excited to be joining Toloka to help the company seize the opportunity to help shape the next chapter of our industry.”
Nebius, a longtime strategic partner, has continued to invest in Toloka as a shareholder, while no longer having controlling voting power.
Arkady Volozh, founder and CEO of Nebius Group, comments, “Attracting world-class strategic investors like Jeff and Mikhail is a strong endorsement of the quality of Toloka’s business and leadership. As enthusiastic backers of Olga and the outstanding Toloka team since day one, we believe this is the best way for Toloka to accelerate its growth and capitalize on the enormous opportunities of the AI revolution. Nebius remains committed to Toloka’s long-term success, and we are excited to be part of what comes next.
The company intends to use the funds to develop hybrid human-AI solutions driven by automation and human expertise.
“This investment will power the development of hybrid human-AI solutions driven by our unique blend of automation and human expertise to shape a future of safe, reliable, and human-centric AI,” says Olga Megorskaya, Founder and CEO of Toloka.
Toloka: High-quality data solutions for AI
Founded by Olga Megorskaya, Toloka has established itself as a trusted data partner for global technology leaders, including Amazon, Microsoft, Anthropic, and Shopify.
The company has evolved from a general-use crowdsourcing platform to a sophisticated provider of PhD-level domain expertise for large language model (LLM) development and virtual environments where experts test AI agents.
The company’s platform manages over 200,000 experts and annotators across more than 100 countries and 40 languages, covering over 50 verified knowledge domains.
This diverse and extensive network enables Toloka to deliver high-quality, human-verified data essential for training and evaluating AI models.
“Reflecting our team’s expertise, Toloka’s research contributions have been recognized at top conferences like NeurIPS and ICML and we regularly contribute to the open-source community through the development of open benchmarks and collaborations with non-profit industry leaders such as MLCommons. I am proud of what we’ve accomplished at Toloka. This is a strong foundation to continue building a future which will always have a place for humans in it,” says Megorskaya.
