The pitch sounds almost quaint in its simplicity: snap a few photos, upload them to an app, and pocket a few dollars. What happens next is where Kled comes in—and where things get interesting.
The San Francisco-based startup, which runs what amounts to a data brokerage connecting amateur photographers with AI labs hungry for training material, just closed a $5.5 million seed round. The March 10, 2026 financing brings Kled's total capital raised to $9 million and attracted a peculiar constellation of backers: Sebastian Thrun, who founded Google's self-driving car project that became Waymo; Aglaé Ventures, the investment arm of LVMH heir Alexandre Arnault; K5 Global; electronic music producer Diplo; Cox Exponential; MSCHF co-founder Daniel Greenberg; DoorDash Labs executive Harrison Shih; and Kent Lacob of the Golden State Warriors.
It's an eclectic group for what is, at its core, a middleman business. Kled's iOS app pays users for photos and videos, then turns around and licenses those assets to AI companies training computer vision and video generation models. The company, formally registered as Nitrility Inc. and led by CEO Avi Patel, is betting it can carve out a profitable niche in a market that didn't really exist three years ago—and may not look anything like this three years from now.
The Licensing Gold Rush
Timing, perhaps more than technology, explains Kled's sudden investor appeal. AI labs are under growing legal and reputational pressure to license training data rather than simply scrape the internet. OpenAI signed a content deal with News Corp on May 23, 2024 and locked Shutterstock into a six-year partnership. Disney went further, investing $1 billion in OpenAI on December 11, 2025 to license its film and television catalog for the Sora video model—the first major Hollywood studio to do so. Meta followed with a $50 million annual News Corp agreement in March.
The deals signal a broader shift. Fortune Business Insights projects the AI training dataset market will balloon from $3.59 billion in 2025 to $23.18 billion by 2034, according to projections as of January 26, 2026. That's a steep trajectory, though forecasts in this sector have a way of aging poorly.
Kled's app, which sports a 4.6-star rating across roughly 650 reviews, pays contributors via PayPal, Venmo, or Solana wallets. The company claims users are uploading between three and four and a half million files daily—a range that itself suggests the numbers are still fluid. Kled says its top earner has pulled in $7,400 in a single month. By January, the startup reported $3 million sitting in user wallets and around 200,000 downloads.
Beyond smartphone snapshots, Kled says it has secured exclusive rights to what it describes as one of the largest aerial drone footage libraries in the U.S. The company also plans to bring more than 800,000 songs onto its Nitrility music licensing marketplace, expanding beyond images and video into audio training data.
A Relaunch, a Valuation, and Questions
The seed round follows a December "V2" relaunch that Kled says pushed its valuation to $100 million after raising roughly $3 million. The company reported distributing $95,000 to users in the first three days after relaunching. A January announcement outlined plans to hand out over $20 million in user rewards tied to partner-led labeling tasks, though Kled hasn't disclosed which partners are paying for that work.
In fact, the company has been notably cagey about naming customers. Kled says "several leading AI labs and enterprises are now actively purchasing" its datasets, but no buyers have been identified publicly. That's not unusual for early-stage enterprise deals, but it leaves open questions about scale and repeatability.
One day after announcing the seed round, Kled integrated Whop as its payments network to manage contributor earnings and cashouts. The startup also operates a token—ticker: KLED—on the Solana blockchain, though the crypto element sits somewhat awkwardly alongside the enterprise licensing narrative. Crypto-focused media outlets raised concerns from June to December 2025 over alleged wallet movements tied to the token, scrutiny that hasn't been fully addressed.
Wedging Into a Fragile Market
The fresh capital positions Kled to expand its contributor pool and dataset inventory at a moment when both content owners and model builders are scrambling to formalize a process that has been, until recently, largely informal and frequently litigious. With venture capitalists, strategic operators from logistics and sports, and entertainment figures now on its cap table, the company is making a bet that this intermediary role—connecting millions of smartphone users with a handful of deep-pocketed AI labs—can become a durable business.
Whether it works depends on factors Kled can't fully control. How long will AI labs need this volume of human-uploaded content as synthetic data generation improves? Will users keep uploading once the novelty fades and payouts compress? And can a startup claiming a $100 million valuation on less than $10 million raised sustain that number when revenue details remain undisclosed?
For now, Kled is racing to build enough scale that those questions become academic. The company is betting the AI training data market will stay messy, litigious, and desperate for licensed alternatives long enough for a middleman to make a fortune. That's a wager, not a certainty.
