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Trajectory raises $45M to make AI model training accessible to nontechnical experts
AI startup Trajectory raises $45 million in a Series A led by Sequoia to automate post-training of AI models.
Key points
- The round was led by Sequoia, with participation from Nvidia, Bessemer Venture Partners and Bain Capital Ventures.
- The 18-person company was founded about a year ago by three Stanford classmates.
- Businesses connect an open source AI model to Trajectory's platform, which uses collected feedback to retrain it over time.
Why it matters. The capability could make deploying specialized AI faster and cheaper for businesses adapting models to fields such as law and finance.
The 18-person startup Trajectory announced it raised $45 million in a Series A round at a $300 million valuation, led by Sequoia. Nvidia, Bessemer Venture Partners and Bain Capital Ventures also participated. Co-founder Ronak Malde told TechCrunch that the platform retrains open source models using customer feedback.
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Trajectory raises $45M to make AI model training accessible to nontechnical experts
The one-year-old startup is now valued at $300 million. Whether developed by OpenAI or Anthropic or built on open source alternatives, current AI models share a critical limitation: They don’t learn from their mistakes without further training. Businesses adapting these models for specialized fields, such as law and finance, typically get around this by fine-tuning general models. However, that often requires hiring internal research teams or relying on expensive consultants, commonly known as forward-deployed engineers (FDEs). Trajectory , a startup founded about a year ago by three Stanford classmates with experience at Google DeepMind and Apple, wants to automate that process, allowing AI models to learn from feedback and continuously improve at specialized tasks. The 18-person company just announced that it raised $45 million in a Series A round at a $300 million valuation, led by Sequoia, with participation from Nvidia, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Bain Capital Ventures. Trajectory co-founder Ronak Malde compared foundational models to a very smart PhD student who’s always starting a new job. “But what the economy values is someone who worked on the job for 30 years,” he told TechCrunch. The startup aims to solve this problem through an approach known as continual learning. Businesses using Trajectory can start with an open source AI model and connect the platform to the.