As AI companies race to improve the accuracy of Large Language Models and apps built on top of them, a startup that has emerged as a key partner in fulfilling that effort is announcing a significant round of funding to expand. Turing, which works with armies of engineers to contribute code to AI projects — those projects include building LLMs for OpenAI and others, as well as Generative AI apps for enterprises — has picked up a Series E of $111 million, doubling its valuation in the process to $2.2 billion.
Turing makes around $167 million in ARR (annualized revenue run rate), and it is already profitable, CEO Jonathan Siddharth said in an interview with TechCrunch. The plan will be to use the funding to double down on expanding its business to more customers and to more use cases. Turing today says that it works with some 4 million coders around the world.
Khazanah Nasional Berhad, Malaysia’s sovereign wealth fund, is leading the round, with participation also from Westbridge Capital, Sozo Ventures, Uphonest Capital, AltaIR Capital, Amino Capital, Plug and Play, MVP Ventures, Fortius Ventures, Gaingels, and Mastodon Capital Management. Palo Alto-based Turing has raised $225 million to date.
Turing’s turn as a major partner to AI companies was not how the company got its start. Originally, it was, effectively, an HR tech startup. Specifically its early product was a platform for vetting and hiring remote-work coders, a business that started to take off during the Covid-19 pandemic with the world’s growing appetite for better tools to source and work with remote teams. That business was strong enough to catapult the company to “unicorn” status.
It was also strong enough to start catching a different kind of attention.
As this story from Semafor last year recounts, Siddharth was summoned in 2022 to OpenAI for a meeting, which he thought would be to talk about recruiting engineers for the startup. Instead, it turned out to be a proposition. OpenAI researchers had discovered that code added into training datasets helped improve the model’s reasoning capabilities, and it wanted Turing’s help to generate that code.
Siddharth obliged and that set off a whole new business focus for the startup, which he says now works with a number of foundational AI companies to provide similar services, as well as with companies that build apps on top of those LLMs.
It hasn’t been a pivot: Siddharth said that Turing still generates a substantial amount of revenue from its older business sourcing coding talent, although he would not disclose how much.
