As AI companies compete to improve the accuracy of large-scale language models (LLMS) and apps built on top of them, startups that have emerged as key partners in their efforts have announced considerable funding. Turing, which works with the military of engineers to provide code to AI projects, has secured a $111 million Series E round, doubled its valuation to $2.2 billion, including helping to build LLMs such as Openai and creating a generator AI app for businesses.
Turing currently generates around $300 million in ARR (annual revenue execution rate), which was $167 million when this latest round was priced. In other words, the company is growing rapidly. Also, CEO Jonathan Siddharth said the company plans to use the funds to expand its business to more customers and expand use cases.
Turing says it is working with around 4 million coders around the world today. The actual number of Turing employees is much smaller – it's hundreds, one of the investors said.
Kazanana Sior Belhad, a Malaysian sovereign wealth fund, leads new rounds from Westbridge Capital, Sozo Ventures, Extreme Capital, Altaia Capital, Amino Capital, Plug and Play, MVP Ventures, Fortius Ventures, Gehningel and Mastodon Capital Management. Palo Alto-based Turing has raised $225 million so far.
Turing's turn as a key partner in AI companies wasn't how the company started. Originally, it was effectively a HR technology startup.
Specifically, the early products were platforms for reviewing and hiring remote coders, businesses that began taking off during the Covid-19 pandemic, and the world wanted better tools to procure and manage remote teams. The business has grown strong enough to assault the company into “unicorn” status to impress both customers and investors.
“My jaw fell when we first met in 2018,” Westbridge co-founder and managing partner Smirchada said in an interview how Siddhas defeated the entire management consulting and offshoring model. “You don't need that. You don't even need HR staff. You can do it all with Turing and a remote engineer.”
It was also strong enough to attract another kind of attention.
As a Semafor report last year, Siddharth was summoned to Openai in 2022 for a meeting. Instead, it turned out to be a proposition. Researchers at Openai discovered that code with code added to the training dataset would help improve the inference functionality of the model, and hoped that Turing help would generate that code.
Siddharth was obliged to do so, which sparked the focus of a whole new business for startups. He currently works with many basic AI companies to provide similar services and works with companies that build apps on top of those LLMs.
“We couldn't predict ChatGpt moments,” he said this week, and he couldn't predict how the infrastructure he built to hire coders would put Turing in the middle of the action. “I don't think people knew how important software engineering tokens were [would be] To think, teach LLM, reasoning and code. ”
But it wasn't a pivot. Siddharth quickly corrected me when I used the term, and he pointed out that, although he doesn't reveal how much he still reveals, Turing still generates considerable income from his old business procurement coding talent.
“They're all growing,” he said of the various business lines. “We're stepping into gas to scale up R&D and expand sales and marketing across all three businesses. It's in a rapid expansion mode.”
However, the main focus from a new business perspective appears to be continuing to double the work with AI as a coding provider for building future LLMs.
Updated to include the latest ARR figures.