Today, Unusual Ventures is excited to celebrate Heartex for raising $25M in Series A fundraising. Since leading Heartex’s Seed investment in October 2020, we have been nothing short of inspired by the team's dedication to bringing automation and artificial intelligence to a key element of the data science tool chain. Organizations today need to adopt data-centric AI practices to improve production model accuracy and ultimately achieve their desired — yet historically elusive — business objectives, and Heartex is leading the charge to make this happen.

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When we first met Heartex CEO and co-founder, Michael Malyuk, we quickly discovered the team’s passion about the benefits that data-centric AI practices could have for every organization attempting to extract value through AI. Just 17 months later, Heartex’s Label Studio platform has been adopted by 100K+ users and helped countless data science teams operationalize, scale, and improve data labeling quality to accurately train machine learning models.

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In Michael and Heartex we recognized the confluence of three game changing qualities: First, we saw talented technical founders with an ambitious product vision who also have a deep appreciation for the power of an open source go-to-market motion. Second, we were big believers in the value an exceptional data labeling product would have on the industry. Third, we saw the growing adoption of Label Studio Community  — the most popular open source project of its kind (now 100K+ users) — and the tremendous community (now with 4K+ members) and knew Heartex could have an outsized impact on the industry.

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We were excited to bring Unusual’s Founder Services team aboard to engage with the Heartex founders. In this case, our expert operators embedded alongside Michael and the Heartex team as interim VPs, working side-by-side specifically on talent, product marketing, nurturing the open source community and early sales.  Most notably, we helped:

• Lead recruiting efforts to hire a phenomenal engineering team and VP of Engineering
• Recruit early design partners and worked with the team to close a number of Enterprise customers
• Bring Label Studio Enterprise to market, including pricing, messaging, content, and demand generation & sales
• Executed content and marketing programs to grow awareness in the community and establish and grow an enterprise funnel

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Heartex has started to scale its business and entered the next phase of growth. It has been an amazing partnership and we couldn’t be more excited for Michael and the entire  team for what they have accomplished and for all that is yet to come. We are also thrilled to Welcome Redpoint Ventures as the Series A lead investor and to have Satish Dharmaraj join the board.

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Onward!

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