Vendor profile · Directory · Platform
Encord
A data infrastructure platform — Annotate, Index, Active — built for physical AI: robotics, autonomous vehicles and sensor-heavy multimodal data.
| Model | Data infrastructure platform for physical AI |
|---|---|
| Founded | 2020 |
| Headquarters | London, United Kingdom |
| Pricing | Not published — free tier reported; paid plans sales-led |
| Website | encord.com |
What Encord does
Encord was founded in London in 2020 by Eric Landau and Ulrik Stig Hansen, both Imperial College London alumni out of financial trading systems. Its three products cover annotation (Annotate), petabyte-scale dataset search and management (Index) and curation and evaluation (Active).
The company has concentrated on physical AI — video, LiDAR, 3D point clouds and synchronized multi-sensor streams — and names customers including Woven by Toyota, Skydio and Agility Robotics. It raised a $60M Series C in February 2026 per company-data reporting.
Strengths
- Native multi-sensor and LiDAR annotation few generalist platforms match
- Curation (Index/Active) treated as a first-class product, not an afterthought
- Strong physical-AI customer list
Considerations
- No published pricing
- Physical-AI focus means narrower fit for language-data buyers
- Funding and headcount figures vary across databases — verify in diligence
Other platforms in the directory
- Labelbox — The platform pick: run annotation in-house on published usage pricing, and bolt on expert services (Alignerr) only where you need them.
- Prolific — The transparency benchmark: a self-serve participant platform with fully published pricing and an enforced participant pay floor.
- Kili Technology — A Paris-built enterprise platform for annotation and LLM evaluation, sold to regulated industries that need data quality controls more than raw labeling volume.
- SuperAnnotate — A multimodal annotation platform that has grown an expert-services arm (SME) hiring domain specialists for AI training and evaluation work.
- CVAT — The open-source annotation workhorse: born at Intel, now run by CVAT.ai as a free self-hosted Community edition plus paid cloud and enterprise tiers with published prices.
- Label Studio (HumanSignal) — The most popular open-source labeling tool — multimodal by design — with HumanSignal selling cloud and enterprise editions and optional expert data services.
- Lightly AI — An ETH Zurich spin-off built on one idea: label less, but label the right data — curation and self-supervised pretraining first, annotation second.
- BasicAI — A platform-and-services company built around multi-sensor data — LiDAR fusion annotation for automotive and robotics is its home ground.
- V7 — The London platform company behind Darwin — AI-assisted visual annotation with a low-cost self-serve entry — now also selling document-workflow agents as V7 Go.
- Dataloop — An Israeli data-pipeline and annotation platform with a strong autonomous-vehicle story — acquired by Dell Technologies in December 2025.
Frequently asked questions
What does Encord do?
A data infrastructure platform — Annotate, Index, Active — built for physical AI: robotics, autonomous vehicles and sensor-heavy multimodal data.
How much does Encord cost?
Encord does not publish pricing (not published — free tier reported; paid plans sales-led). Any figure quoted by third parties is an estimate; budget discovery requires engaging the vendor directly.
Who is Encord best for?
Robotics, AV and drone teams whose core problem is curating and annotating synchronized sensor data at scale.
Who should not use Encord?
Text-and-conversation-first LLM data programs — the product’s center of gravity is visual and sensor data.
Sources
Facts on this page were drawn from the public sources above, checked November 2026. If you spot an error, tell us at the corrections address in the footer — we fix sourced errors and note the change.
Profile last updated: November 8, 2026 · How we write profiles · Corrections: contact@bestdataannotation.com