Datumo Raises $15.5M for No-Code AI Trust & Safety Tools
Seoul-based Datumo, a company at the forefront of AI trust and safety, has successfully closed a $15.5 million funding round, bringing its total capital raised to approximately $28 million. This significant investment, which saw participation from prominent investors including Salesforce Ventures, KB Investment, ACVC Partners, and SBI Investment, underscores the escalating importance of ensuring the reliability and ethical deployment of artificial intelligence in the modern enterprise landscape.
Co-founded in 2018 by David Kim, a former AI researcher at Korea’s Agency for Defence Development, and five alumni from the Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST), Datumo initially launched as SelectStar, a data labeling platform. The company quickly gained traction, securing pre-contract sales and exceeding $1 million in revenue within its first year, attracting major Korean conglomerates such as Samsung, LG, Hyundai, Naver, and SK Telecom as clients. However, as the demands of its clientele evolved beyond basic data annotation to include scoring and comparing AI model outputs, Datumo strategically pivoted its focus to full-stack AI evaluation and safety. This evolution led to the release of Korea’s first benchmark dataset specifically designed for AI trust and safety.
Datumo’s flagship product, Datumo Eval, is a no-code, full-stack evaluation platform designed to address the critical need for AI explainability and trustworthiness. This innovative tool automatically generates test data and evaluations to identify unsafe, biased, or incorrect AI responses, eliminating the need for manual scripting or deep technical expertise. The accessibility of Datumo Eval means that non-developers on policy, trust and safety, and compliance teams can actively participate in ensuring AI integrity. A key differentiator for Datumo is its utilization of unique licensed datasets, particularly data meticulously crawled from published books, which provides rich, structured human reasoning, albeit challenging to clean.
The timing of Datumo’s funding round highlights a broader industry trend. A recent McKinsey report revealed that a significant portion of organizations feel unprepared to safely implement generative AI, with 40% identifying AI explainability—the ability to understand how and why an AI makes decisions—as a major risk, yet only 17% are actively addressing it. This gap underscores the surging demand for robust AI Trust, Risk, and Security Management (TRiSM) solutions. The global TRiSM market, valued at approximately $2.34 billion in 2024, is projected to surge to between $7.44 billion and $16.38 billion by 2030-2034, demonstrating a compound annual growth rate exceeding 21%. This growth is primarily driven by the increasing integration of AI across sectors and the imperative for ethical AI practices.
Datumo’s no-code approach is particularly relevant in this climate, as it democratizes AI evaluation, making advanced capabilities accessible to a wider range of business users who may lack traditional programming skills. This empowers organizations to build and deploy AI models with greater confidence and responsibility. The new capital will significantly accelerate Datumo’s research and development efforts, particularly in automating evaluation tools for enterprise AI, and will fuel its global go-to-market expansion across South Korea, Japan, and the United States. With 150 employees in Seoul and a recently established presence in Silicon Valley, Datumo is strategically positioned to become a key player in shaping a more trustworthy and accountable AI ecosystem.