Luel Raises $31.2M Seed Round for AI Training Data Marketplace

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Luel has raised $31.2 million in a Seed round, one of the largest seed rounds in Y Combinator’s history. The capital will scale a platform that pays people around the world to turn their daily lives into AI training data.

The round was led by General Catalyst and Lightspeed Venture Partners. Other backers include Paul Graham, Orange Collective, Human Capital, Mo Amdani, and executives from Microsoft, xAI, Apple, and the Meta board.

Founded in 2026 by William Namgyal and Inigo Lenderking, Luel runs an AI data marketplace that connects individuals with paid opportunities to generate training data for artificial intelligence models. It operates as a two-sided marketplace for on-demand video and audio training data, linking AI teams with contributors who create high-quality datasets.

Within months, Luel has processed more than 1 million submissions through its quality-assurance pipeline and runs more than 40 active dataset campaigns at any given time. Its customers span generative AI labs, robotics companies, major social platforms, universities, hospitals, banks, and machine learning research groups.

The new funding will go toward scaling the contributor network from hundreds of thousands into the millions, subsidizing the collection of strategically important datasets, and deepening the company’s investment in research.