Mercor competitor Deccan AI raises $25M, sources experts from India | TechCrunch

As demand grows for training and refining AI models, Deccan AI — a startup supplying post-training data and evaluation work — has raised $25 million in its first major funding round, with much of that work carried out by an India-based workforce of experts. The all-equity Series A round was led by A91 Partners, with participation from Susquehanna International Group and Prosus Ventures. While frontier AI labs including OpenAI and Anthropic build core models in-house, much of the post-training work — from data generation to evaluation and reinforcement learning — is increasingly being outsourced as companies push to make systems reliable in real-world use. Deccan is emerging as one of a new set of startups serving that demand. Founded in October 2024, Deccan provides services ranging from helping models improve coding and agent capabilities to training systems to interact with external tools such as application programming interfaces (APIs), which connect AI models to software systems. The startup works with frontier labs on tasks such as generating expert feedback, running evaluations and building reinforcement learning environments, while also serving enterprises through products including its evaluation suite, Helix, and an operations automation platform. The work is also evolving as models move beyond text into so-called “world models” that better understand physical environments, including robotics and vision systems. Deccan’s customers include Google DeepMind and Snow...