Last Updated: 26 August 2026
Mundo AI wants to help computers understand the world the way people do, not just through words on a screen, but through tone of voice, timing, and the small signals that make up a real conversation. The company was founded by CEO Jason Liao, along with co-founders Garreth Lee, Kenneth Wu, and Naijide Anwaer. Ahnaf Muqset Haque joined as founding product manager.
AI models today are good at many things. They write code, solve math problems, and answer complicated questions. Most of that progress comes from training on text, which is neatly organized and easy for a computer to process. Real life is not so tidy. People talk over each other. Background noise gets in the way. A camera only ever sees part of a room. The market for AI training data, the information used to teach these systems, was worth about $3.2 billion in 2025 and is expected to grow more than 22 percent a year, according to Grand View Research. Data that combines audio, video, and other formats is one of the fastest-growing parts of that market. That is the space Mundo AI is trying to fill.
The company has raised a $20 million Series A round led by GreatPoint Ventures. Y Combinator, Next Frontier Ventures, and E12 Ventures also took part. Add in a previously unannounced $4 million seed round, and Mundo AI has now raised $24 million in total.
Mundo AI calls this idea perceptual intelligence. In simple terms, it means an AI system's ability to pick up on things people usually notice without even trying. A pause that means someone is confused. A shift in tone that separates real excitement from polite small talk. A hand gesture pointing at something instead of naming it. Humans read these signals constantly. Machines mostly cannot.
The company argues that as AI tools move into voice assistants and video applications, they need to get better at reading these cues, not just processing language. Most existing tests and benchmarks were built for text. They were never designed to check whether a system understands tone, timing, or body language. Mundo AI says it builds the datasets and evaluation tools that AI labs use to measure and improve this kind of understanding.
The company plans to use the money to grow its team. That means hiring across research, engineering, and operations, the areas needed to build data at a larger scale and manage relationships with AI lab customers.
The funding also reflects a shift in what the company does. Mundo AI started out solving a narrower problem: there simply was not enough good training data in languages other than English. According to its Y Combinator launch post, the company built its early datasets by working directly with native speakers, rather than relying on synthetic data or machine translation. Those methods, the company said, "simply don't achieve the desired results." Now Mundo AI is applying a similar approach to new kinds of data, including audio and video, areas where established ways of measuring quality do not yet exist.
Mundo AI was founded in 2024 and went through Y Combinator's Winter 2025 batch. Jason Liao is the company's founder and CEO. According to Y Combinator, Mundo AI is based in Vancouver, Canada, and now has a team of 30 people.
Put simply, Mundo AI does not build AI models. It builds the material other companies use to train and test their own models. Its datasets and evaluations are already used by AI labs working on multimodal systems, the kind that combine speech, video, and other formats. In its original multilingual data work, the company built its process around native speakers instead of synthetic data or machine translation, an approach it said produced better results than those alternatives.
GreatPoint Ventures, the round's lead investor, is a San Francisco-based venture firm founded by people with experience building and running companies of their own. Y Combinator, which supported Mundo AI early on, also joined the round, along with Next Frontier Ventures and E12 Ventures.
This Series A follows a $4 million seed round that had not been announced before now. Together, the two rounds bring Mundo AI's total funding to $24 million.
