Jeff Bezos’ personal fund, Bezos Expeditions, has just investing $ 72 million, around 64 million euros, in Toloka, a company based in Amsterdam specializing in data solutions for artificial intelligence. The operation, announced in early May, marks an important step for this company still little known to the general public but already active with customers such as Microsoft, Amazon, Shopify or Anthropic.
Founded by Olga Megorskaya, Toloka wants to provide technology companies with quality human data to train, validate and improve artificial intelligence models. Initially designed as a micro-field platform, the company has gradually specialized in data expert annotation, the creation of open source benchmarks and the development of virtual testing environments for generative artificial intelligence. It is based today on a network of more than 200,000 human employees distributed in more than one hundred countries and active in forty languages.
The arrival of Jeff Bezos among investors is accompanied by a change in governance. Mikhail Parakhin, director of technology at Shopify, also participates in this funding and joins the board of directors as an executive president. He underlines that “the demand for an expertise of global class data is more urgent than ever” and that Toloka is according to him “particularly well positioned to respond to them, thanks to the excellence of his engineering, his academic recognition and his ability to conjugate scientific rigor and human coordination on a large scale. »»
Until recently, Toloka was part of the Nebius universe, from the spin-off of international assets in Yandex. Nebius retains an important economic part in the company but no longer has the majority voting power. This evolution gives Toloka reinforced autonomy to continue its expansion. Arkady Volozh, founder and managing director of Nebius Group, believes that the arrival of Bezos and Parakhin is “validation of the quality of the project carried by Olga and his team”, while marking a transition to a new development phase.
The investment aims to strengthen Toloka’s capacity to design hybrid systems associating artificial intelligence and human intervention. The objective is to offer reliable, secure and transparent solutions in a context where algorithmic governance challenges are increasing importance for businesses and regulators. Olga MEGORSKAYA specifies that “this funding will allow us to strengthen our approach based on human -assisted automation, in a logic of artificial intelligence responsible and centered on the user”.
This operation comes as the debates on the quality of the data used to cause language models are intensifying, especially in Europe with the arrival of AI Act. In this context, Toloka’s promise takes on a particular dimension. Producing traceable data, validated by experts and in accordance with regulatory requirements becomes a strategic lever. The company already benefits from recognition in the scientific community with publications in conferences such as Neurips or ICML, and regular contributions to the work of the MLCommons consortium.
