Kled AI

Today, we’re announcing our $5.5M Seed round to build the first human data marketplace. Backed by Sebastian Thrun (Founder of Waymo), Aglaé (Venture Fund of Bernard Arnault), K5 Global, Diplo, Parable VC, Cox Exponential (CX2), Daniel Greenberg (Founder of MSCHF), Harrison Shih (DoorDash Labs), Kent Lacob (Owner of Golden State Warriors), and more. This brings our total financing to $9 million. (Thread)

@avipat_ @Jason @alex kled.ai

Thank you for having me on the podcast @Jason and @alex. Genuinely refreshing, and thank you for supporting us.

@avipat_ Kled will always prioritize data quality, lab safety, and user data safety above all. That is the gold standard we will uphold ourselves to for the rest of time.

I just found out that Luel AI, the company that completely copied my company Kled's entire website, is misrepresenting their compliance practices, using Delve to outsource it, fabricating their website user numbers, and pulling in massive amounts of fraud data from exclusively fraud oriented regions. Skip to 1:15 if you want to skip context. You truly cannot make this up. This is egregious, disgusting behavior from everyone involved. This is people's data. It cannot be taken lightly. The only way a company like this can truly succeed is by investing the time and resources to commit 100% to the trust and compliance of their users' data. Luel AI is doing the exact opposite. Disgusting behavior for a company trusted with people's data.

@avipat_ hq

Kled main office in construction...

@avipat_ jobs.ashbyhq.com/kled-ai

Several of TikTok's leading fraud engineers will be quitting and joining the Kled team in the upcoming weeks. Our revenue has significantly climbed over the last few days and we will be increasing our engineering team size by 5x over the coming months. Check all our existing career opportunities on our website: kled.ai

@avipat_ @Lazarbeam 24kGoldn* (intern getting fired lol) we love you @24kGoldn

LazarBeam has just invested into Kled. 23 million subscribers, one of the biggest YouTubers of all time, and someone I personally watched relentlessly growing up. Welcome to the cap table Lannan. He will be joining, Diplo, PandaBoi, 24kGolden, and all the other creatives who have angel invested in Kled. Proud to have you join us.

@avipat_ @Lazarbeam Welcome to the team!

Live to earn.

Fully revamped tasks for everyone

@avipat_ We will be releasing a full custom trust center soon

Kled is partnering with Vanta and Workstreet to build automated SOC 2 Type II, ISO 27001, HIPAA, and GDPR compliance infrastructure for our marketplace. Most data marketplaces stop at SOC 2. We are implementing all four major compliance frameworks, the highest level of compliance infrastructure reasonably available to a company at our stage. This means Kled can fully process, package, and process any type of user data: safely, consensually, and at scale. The leading AI labs and enterprise customers don't just want good data. They want data they can stake their models and products on. Enterprise contracts and institutional buyers require this infrastructure before serious conversations can happen. We're building it now so it's never the reason a deal doesn't close in the future. The data marketplace that wins long term is the one labs and enterprises trust most.

@avipat_ Higher

Kled has has 4 record user signup days in a row. We've offically ranked top 100 in the app store in over 82 countries. The United States constitutes our second most downloaded region where we almost crossed the top 100 on the app store finance charts (rank 162). Our overall fraud rate has fallen to a below 13% average, across 1 billion uploads. We have purged and deleted all 68 million uploads from Nigerian users (this data was never sent to any AI labs or entities and Nigerian users keep their payouts). Our support ticket volume has dropped 34% thanks to in-app improvements, even as our user base has scaled significantly. Our app reviews have remained and climbed to a 4.9 star ranking in new developing regions like Indonesia. With an overall 4.6 star ranking across thousands of reviews. Over 60% of new signups are coming from direct referrals, users bringing in users. Our average user completes their first upload within 2 minutes of creating an account.

@avipat_ We thank all the legitimate contributors from here, we will be back soon enough.

We have removed Kled from the Nigerian app store and IP banned the entire region. The first thing I would like to say is I have nothing against Nigeria. I have a ton of friends from this region and these were some of our earliest app adopters. Genuinely, thank you all for the support. Kled has been up and running and out of beta for 4 months now. We have paid out hundreds of thousands of people for their data, and our users have uploaded over 1 billion assets onto our platform. After several months of uploads we found that Nigeria had a ≈95% fraud rate. Instead of real, usable data, users were uploading pictures of black screens, duplicate photos, internet generated images, AI generated images, etc. at an unimaginable scale. In comparison, Malaysia, Indonesia, and the Philippines have a less than 10% fraud rate across 10x the userbase size. Our fraud system is fast to catch these issues but the level of complexity of these schemes is getting out of hand. This weekend we were flooded with thousands of fake Japanese passports and identity cards with Nigerians photoshopped onto them in our KYC system. That was the final straw. As a startup we can't afford to eat the costs of that data overhead, so we temporarily removed the app from the region while we improved our fraud detection and banning system to quickly filter out bad actors when the time is right. On top of all of this, every time we make a post there is someone asking us to bring the region back within seconds. We hear you, but it's gotten out of hand. We've made this decision with great care. We love everyone who has genuinely supported Kled from Nigeria, and we hope to return when the time is right. -Kled Team

1 year later.

@avipat_ lab trust is the only thing that matters to us, this will be rolled out soon to the public

our biggest focus for the next 2 months at kled is trust & safety. so we built a fully public audit trail for every single upload on the app, updates automatically the second it's made. the moment we send data to an AI lab, they can search the hash ID of any image, video, doc, or audio file and see exactly: - the tos + privacy policy the user signed - every compliance check we ran - anonymized kyc proof - confirmation the user got paid - a full timestamp of the entire interaction start to finish any ai lab can now verify the legitimacy of any dataset in seconds, making us the first data marketplace in history to publicize its data audit records. consumer identities are fully anonymized and hidden, no users will be exposed in the process.

@solana @avipat_ Own your data

Why We Ship: @useKled Pokémon Go players generated 30 billion images and videos that Niantic used, and never saw a cent for it. @avipat_ built Kled so the people generating the data get rewarded. 50,000 DMs and three and a half years later, it's the largest human-powered data collection effort in history, distributing rewards on Solana.

@avipat_ 🇲🇾

Kled just entered voice. Users can record and upload real-world speech, capturing tone, accent, emotion, and context in a way models can actually learn from. We’ll initially support multilingual uploads across: Malay (Bahasa Malaysia), Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia), and Filipino/Tagalog. Voice is one of the most under-collected, high-value data types in AI today. Accents, tone, emotion, environment. This is the layer models still struggle with. All voice data will be packaged and sold to leading voice foundation model teams, both directly and through our distribution partners. We’ve designed 50 starter tasks, rolling out in our V3 update, so users can start contributing immediately.