Human cloud firm CrowdFlower, a crowdsourcing platform serving artificial intelligence development teams, raised $20 million in a new round of venture funding. San Francisco-based CrowdFlower said the money will go to extending the functionality of its platform and hiring data scientists, machine learning experts, engineers, customer success managers, and sales and marketing professionals.

“We’re at the beginning of a Cambrian explosion of AI applications within the enterprise,” CrowdFlower CEO Robin Bordoli said. “The bottleneck for the large-scale adoption of machine learning still remains the availability of high-quality training data and human-in-the-loop workflows to handle the failure states of the algorithm.”

Industry Ventures led the investment round; new investor Salesforce Ventures also participated, as well as existing investors Canvas Ventures, Microsoft Ventures and Trinity Ventures.

“With this funding, we can accelerate our reach and help data science and machine learning teams everywhere produce the training data they need within the scale, cost and quality parameters that matter to them,” Bordoli said.

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