Prolific operates a platform that connects organizations with a vetted panel of 120,000 human participants to test products and provide training and validation data for AI systems. It offers tooling including more than 300 filters based on census and other data to help customers target representative samples. The company pays participants at least £6 per hour (typically more) and has paid out about $100 million to date. Customers named in the article include Google, Stanford, the University of Oxford, King’s College London and the European Commission. Founded in 2014 and based in London, Prolific had previously raised only a $1.4M seed after YC and had been profitable until accepting VC funding. It raised new capital to expand its product and rapidly grow its participant base, and it says it will continue to focus on AI applications rather than expanding beyond them. Prolific offers an online tool to recruit and pay research participants, prescreen for target demographics, automate payments and enable direct researcher–participant communication. The company emphasizes “ethical and trustworthy” research, mandates a minimum pay of £5 ($6.50) per hour, and uses proprietary user-validation technology (statistical algorithms and machine learning) to detect bots and bad actors. Founded in 2014 by Ekaterina Damer and Phelim Bradley, Prolific has grown largely by word-of-mouth to more than 3,000 customers including Stanford, Oxford, Yale, UPenn, the World Bank and several Fortune 500 companies. It claims a network of 70,000-plus active research participants from diverse backgrounds. Prolific’s stated vision is to build the most powerful and flexible infrastructure for research on the internet and to provide higher-quality sampling than legacy platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk.

Total raised

$33M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Jul 2023