Staying ahead of the curve: Our Series A in Datacurve

Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve led a $15 million Series A in Datacurve. Datacurve works with the world's leading foundation model labs to provide high quality and complex coding data to unlock model improvements and new capabilities. 

We started Chemistry with the belief that the next generation of iconic companies will be built by AI-native founders with a combination of technical skills and commercial instincts. Every so often, we meet founders who embody that vision so clearly that it’s impossible not to lean in. That was the case with Serena Ge and her co-founder Charley Lee. After our first meeting with Serena, we began referring to her internally as a “porcupine” – a term meant to convey our highest regard for founders who spike in so many different directions. 

Serena has always been ahead of the curve. In high school she made a top-ranked climbing app to coach herself to become a competitive rock climber when she couldn’t afford coaches. She dropped out of the University of Waterloo at 18 to join Y Combinator (a non-consensus decision at Waterloo) and she’s been pushing the frontier of AI ever since. 

Along the way she realized something fundamental: the real bottleneck for AI progress isn’t just about compute or model design, it’s about data. The quality of the data you train on determines the ceiling of what your models can achieve. And today, coding is the most important domain to win in AI - not only because of its immense economic value, but because breakthroughs in code understanding directly enhances general reasoning and accuracy across models.

That insight led her to start Datacurve, an entirely new way of creating training datasets. Instead of relying on low-cost offshore labor, Datacurve built a gamified bounty hunter platform (shipd.ai) that attracts skilled software engineers to compete in building some of the hardest-to-source datasets. Datacurve’s contributors aren’t just driven by money, they grind hard to outperform each other for the clout and community rewards - all resulting in higher quality data.The result is a lean, scalable engine for data creation that delivers exceptional precision and speed.

It’s working. Datacurve has already paid out more than $1 million in bounties, signed multimillion-dollar contracts with leading AI labs, and just last week closed their largest seven-figure deal to date with one of the biggest companies in the world.  

With Scale now operating inside Meta, the industry is hungry for an independent, next-generation alternative. Datacurve is stepping into that role, and Serena is quickly emerging as one of the most important founders in the AI ecosystem.

We’re thrilled to be on this journey with Serena and the Datacurve team, who have shown unrelenting hustle and energy (even living out of tents in their office for a time). This is one of the fastest growing companies we’ve invested in, and if you are interested in their mission, they are hiring across the board. Check out their open positions here.