Toloka Fuels Next Stage of Growth with Investment Led by Bezos Expeditions
Today, I'm happy to share a major milestone in Toloka’s journey: we’ve secured a strategic investment led by Bezos Expeditions, the investment arm of Jeff Bezos, with participation from Mikhail Parakhin — CTO of Shopify and board advisor to GenAI leaders like Perplexity, Liquid.ai, and Recraft. As part of this round, Mikhail joins Toloka’s Board of Directors as a Chairman. Nebius, our longtime strategic partner, continues to support Toloka as a shareholder, while no longer having controlling voting power.
For many years, Toloka has served as a trusted data partner for global technology leaders, including Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft, poolside, Recraft, Shopify, and more. Evolving from our roots as a general-use crowdsourcing platform, we’ve transformed data production from simple data annotation tasks to PhD-level domain expertise for LLM development, and expanded to virtual environments where experts test AI agents. As our business evolves, one thing remains unchanged: human input is essential in AI development.
We’ve built a robust platform for managing the efforts of over 200K experts and annotators, representing over 50 verified knowledge domains, 100+ countries and 40+ languages, creating an ecosystem that empowers experts across the globe to share and monetize their experience in a dignified and comfortable manner. Reflecting our team's expertise, Toloka’s research contributions have been recognized at top conferences like NeurIPS and ICML and we regularly contribute to the open-source community through the development of open benchmarks and collaborations with non-profit industry leaders such as MLCommons.
I am proud of what we’ve accomplished at Toloka. This is a strong foundation to continue building a future which will always have a place for humans in it.
On this path, we welcome the support of our new investors. Jeff Bezos’ backing of Toloka, combined with Mikhail's technological vision and Nebius’ long-term support is a strong validation of Toloka’s traction, potential and ambitions. This investment will power the development of hybrid human-AI solutions driven by our unique blend of automation and human expertise to shape a future of safe, reliable, and human-centric AI.
I feel extremely grateful to the Toloka team, our experts, our customers, partners and stakeholders for supporting us on this journey — and I’m excited to open a new chapter in Toloka’s development.
Olga Megorskaya
Founder and CEO of Toloka
Direct media inquiries to press@toloka.ai
