Learn more: TechCrunch Exclusive, Handshake Press Release
Friends,
Anish, Jonas, and I founded Cleanlab with a singular mission: to make AI fulfill its promise to work reliably for humanity by providing the cleanest, highest quality AI data on Earth. Handshake acquired Cleanlab to leap this mission forward. Our singular focus will be to lead Handshake AI research in producing the highest quality data to train frontier AI models.
As part of this merger, Handshake is acquiring Cleanlab’s latest research and technologies in confident learning, data-centric AI, and LLM evaluation.
1 + 1 = 3: During the M&A process, I learned that other AI data labs were sourcing their human talent through the 20 million pre-vetted fellows on Handshake’s career network. Handshake’s leaders recognized this and pivoted, enabling the frontier labs to access talent at the source, and hit 100M run rate in just 7 months—faster than any other human data lab. The missing piece needed was an AI research arm to partner with the AI labs. That’s where Cleanlab comes in. This acquisition combines 1 (Handshake AI network) + 1 (Cleanlab AI research) = 3 (the best positioned data lab on the market).
To our users: Cleanlab’s data-centric AI package will remain open-source under a more permissive Apache-2.0 license. Thank you for making Cleanlab the most downloaded open-source data-centric AI package on the internet, with over a million downloads, billions of AI datapoints cleaned, and usage by 100+ of Fortune-100 companies. Please continue to use our open-source products to create AI that serves humanity, not the other way around.
To our enterprise customers: We know reliability remains your biggest problem in enterprise AI, and we know it’s only getting worse. This acquisition positions us to address the data quality problem at the source. Our core mission—to make AI work reliably for people and businesses—remains, and we are excited to tackle it upstream by ensuring frontier LLMs are trained with the highest-quality data.
To our investors: Thank you for believing in us and our vision to solve “garbage in, garbage out,” and make AI work reliably for more use cases and tasks for people. We look forward to continuing this journey together at Handshake. A special shout out to Aaref Hilaly for believing in us first and to Matt Murphy and the Menlo team who went above and beyond to earn their job title as “partner.” In other words, please continue to invite us to hang out with Jensen Huang and Alex Honnold.
To our MIT community and friends: Cleanlab was built with the culture you taught us. That culture taught us grit and deep humility. Thank you to the many friends who bailed us out of social bankruptcy while we were heads down, building.
We’re excited to embark on this journey with Handshake and we hope you’ll continue to support us.
In pursuit of good,
Curtis
CEO and Co-founder, Cleanlab
About Cleanlab Founded in 2021 by three MIT Computer Science PhDs and trusted by over 100 of Fortune-500 organizations, Cleanlab adds trust to every input and output of AI models. Cleanlab AI technologies use data-centric AI to improve the quality of data used by AI models. Cleanlab products find and fix errors in AI datasets and add reliability to AI outputs. Recognized as a Forbes AI 50 company, Cleanlab is based in San Francisco and backed by leading investors including Menlo Ventures, Bain Capital Ventures, TQ Ventures, Databricks Ventures, Samsung Ventures and angel investors including the CEOs and founders of Yahoo, GitHub, MosaicML, and Okta.