Wirestock has raised a $23 million Series A to expand its creator-made multimodal training data business. The tough part in this market isn’t just collecting more files. It’s packaging legally cleared, human-made content into something model builders can train on without a rights mess later. Co-founder and CEO Mikayel Khachatryan launched Wirestock in 2018 with Ashot Mnatsakanyan, Vladimir Khoetsyan, and Hovhanness Kuloghlyan, initially helping creators sell across stock marketplaces before pivoting into AI data supply in 2023. Nava Ventures led the round. SBVP, Formula VC, and I2BF Ventures joined in.
What is Wirestock and how does it work?
At this point, Wirestock is basically a two-sided marketplace for creative AI training data. On one side, it recruits photographers, videographers, illustrators, designers, filmmakers, 3D artists, and now even music creators. On the other side, Wirestock sells AI labs ready-made visual datasets or custom content packages tailored to specific training goals. Its public dataset library already includes stock images and vectors. It also includes high-speed video, sports footage, dance videos, raw UGC clips, and long-form video. The broader platform has more than 50 million assets available.
For contributors, the workflow is pretty straightforward. A creator fills out a profile and applies for projects that match their skill set. They submit sample work, then get matched to paid assignments if the quality bar is high enough. Wirestock tracks project earnings in a dashboard and pays monthly. There’s a catch. Applicants must complete an unpaid test task first, and Wirestock uses both AI and human review to decide who gets accepted.
For buyers, the pitch is speed plus control. Wirestock offers off-the-shelf material from its existing library while also building custom multimodal datasets for AI teams. That matters because training a creative model often needs very specific combinations of format and labeling. Style, subject matter, and rights clearance matter too. Wirestock has had to retrain internal teams to annotate and label content in more detail. It then built sales and enterprise functions that can work with hyperscalers instead of just stock-photo customers.
What’s changed from the old Wirestock is the level of manual work it removes. In its early days, Wirestock helped creators upload content once and distribute it across multiple stock marketplaces while managing tasks like keywording, titles, and model releases. The AI version keeps that operational DNA, but turns it toward data procurement and dataset assembly instead of stock distribution.
Who founded Wirestock and why did it pivot?
The founding story
Wirestock began with a simple creator-tools idea. Khachatryan and his co-founders were already heavy users of stock content in other businesses, and after talking with contributors in 2018, they realized that selling visual work online involved too many repetitive steps. The company’s first product helped photographers, videographers, and illustrators license and monetize work across multiple marketplaces from one place.
That original version got real traction. By 2022, the platform had more than 100,000 photographers. But the bigger opportunity showed up once AI labs started looking for creative material that wasn’t just scraped from the public web. Wirestock pivoted in 2023 and let creators opt out of the new AI data supply business. Khachatryan said the company was transparent about the shift and that “the majority” of contributors chose to stay in.
Why the founders fit this market
Khachatryan’s path into this business isn’t the usual pure-AI founder story. In a 2021 interview, he said he came from a mathematics, statistics, and finance background, spent about a year in finance, then left because he wanted to build technology products instead. That matters here because Wirestock’s business sits in an awkward middle ground: part creator economy and part data operations. It’s also part enterprise sales. It needs someone who can think about workflow, not just model hype.
The broader founding team fit the problem for a different reason. Wirestock’s company history says the four founders were longtime friends obsessed with tech and spent a lot of time talking directly with artists before settling on the original marketplace-distribution idea. That early focus on creator pain helps explain why the company could later repurpose its supply base into an AI data network instead of starting from zero.
Traction after the pivot
This is where the story gets more interesting. Wirestock has more than 700,000 artists and designers signed up to complete creative tasks on the platform, and it currently supplies multimodal data to 6 of the largest foundation model makers, though it won’t name them. Khachatryan also said the business is running at a $40 million annual revenue run rate and has paid out $15 million to contributors so far. The company employs 60 people.
The way that revenue evolved is telling. Khachatryan said many of the first AI deals were just “off the shelf,” using existing library content, but the market shifted toward custom requests. That’s a stronger position than being a commodity stock archive. Custom data is harder to source. It’s harder to QA and usually harder to replace.
The Wirestock funding round
The new round is a $23 million Series A. Nava Ventures led it, and SBVP — the fund co-founded by Sheryl Sandberg — joined alongside Formula VC and I2BF Ventures. The raise brings Wirestock’s total capital raised to about $26 million, so this is the company’s first big institutional step-up rather than one more small extension.
The money is earmarked for research and engineering. Product hiring is part of the plan too. Wirestock is also building enterprise software so AI labs can collaborate on datasets, which hints at a product expansion beyond pure supply brokerage. Because the company wants more creative coverage in areas like 3D, audio, and music, some of this capital will go toward broadening the contributor base and the internal labeling stack.
Competition and positioning
Wirestock isn’t trying to beat Scale AI or Surge AI at everything. That would be a bad plan. Those companies operate at massive scale across many kinds of data work, and Scale in particular was valued at more than $29 billion after Meta’s June 13, 2025 investment for a 49% stake. Surge has also been discussed in the market at valuations ranging from $15 billion to $25 billion.
Wirestock’s angle is narrower and, frankly, more defensible. It focuses on creative modalities — image, video, illustration, design, gaming, 3D, and potentially audio — where rights, aesthetics, and contributor consent matter a lot. That makes its closer alternatives a weird mix: general data-labeling giants like Scale and Surge. There are also labor marketplaces like Mercor, licensed-data marketplaces like Human Native AI, and old-school stock libraries that were never built for AI training from day one. Human Native AI, for example, raised £2.8 million in seed funding for licensed AI data.
Why does this Wirestock funding round matter?
This round matters because Wirestock has already proved there’s money in the pivot. A $40 million run rate is not seed-stage experimentation. It suggests the company found a real buyer category fast, then found a second gear in custom projects once labs stopped wanting generic image dumps and started asking for more structured multimodal inputs.
It also matters for creators. A lot of AI-data businesses treat human contributors as interchangeable labor. Wirestock is pitching something a bit different: creative professionals as a renewable supply chain for premium training data. That doesn’t erase the labor questions around unpaid screening tasks or platform power. But it does create a clearer commercial path for photographers, illustrators, filmmakers, and designers who otherwise might have been cut out of the AI stack entirely.
It matters for investors too because the bet isn’t just on one dataset library. Martignetti’s thesis was that multimodal data won’t only be useful for generating prettier images or better video. He argued it will matter for models tackling “real-world tasks.” If that’s right, then a company that can continuously source, curate, and refine rights-cleared creative data starts to look less like a marketplace and more like infrastructure.
How big is the market for Wirestock’s AI data niche?
The macro numbers explain why startups like this are getting funded now. Grand View Research projects the global multimodal AI market will reach $10.89 billion by 2030, growing at a 36.8% CAGR from 2025 to 2030. Separate data from Technavio says the AI training dataset market is expected to expand by $9.12 billion from 2025 to 2030, with a 28.9% CAGR over that stretch.
Those figures line up with the broader shift inside AI development. Labs want models that can reason across text, images, video, and audio, which means they need richer and cleaner source material than the web usually provides. That pushes demand toward curated, licensed, multimodal datasets. Especially in creative categories where copyright risk and low-quality labeling can wreck model output.
Conclusion: what to watch next
Wirestock funding at this stage is less about a flashy round number and more about whether the company can turn a creator marketplace into durable AI data infrastructure. It already has supply, revenue, and some serious customers. The next thing to watch is whether its enterprise software and expansion into 3D, audio, and music make it stickier — or whether bigger data firms decide creative multimodal work is too valuable to leave to a specialist.
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FAQ
– What is the latest Wirestock funding round?
Wirestock raised a $23 million Series A announced on May 14, 2026. Nava Ventures led the round, and SBVP, Formula VC, and I2BF Ventures also participated, bringing the company’s total capital raised to about $26 million.
– How does Wirestock work for AI labs and creators?
Wirestock connects AI labs with a network of more than 700,000 creators who produce or license visual and other creative assets for model training. Labs can buy ready-made datasets or commission custom sets, while creators apply to projects, get reviewed for quality, track earnings in a dashboard, and receive monthly payouts.
– Who founded Wirestock?
Wirestock was started in 2018 by Mikayel Khachatryan, Ashot Mnatsakanyan, Vladimir Khoetsyan, and Hovhanness Kuloghlyan. Khachatryan has said he came from a math, statistics, and finance background before leaving finance to build technology products for creators.
– Is Wirestock a stock photo company or an AI data company?
It started as a stock-distribution and creator monetization tool, but since 2023 it has been operating as an AI data supplier focused on multimodal creative content. That puts it in a fast-growing corner of the market tied to licensed training datasets, visual AI training, and multimodal model development rather than traditional stock photography alone.
