Snorkel AI, Inc.

Snorkel AI, Inc. is a technology company founded in 2019 by Alexander Ratner, Christopher Ré, Braden Hancock, Henry Ehrenberg, and Paroma Varma. The company is headquartered in Redwood City, California. Spun out of the Stanford AI Lab after several years of research, Snorkel AI focuses on programmatic data development to address the manual data labeling bottleneck in artificial intelligence. The founding team initially led the Snorkel open-source project at Stanford before establishing the commercial entity to meet enterprise demands for scalable AI data solutions.

Business/Product Breakdown

Snorkel AI, Inc. provides an AI data development platform designed to accelerate the creation, evaluation, and refinement of machine learning models and large language models (LLMs). The company's core product, Snorkel Flow, enables users to replace manual, hand-labeled data processes with programmatic labeling. Through a technique known as weak supervision, subject matter experts write "labeling functions" - such as rules, heuristics, or patterns - that the platform uses to automatically label large, unstructured datasets. This system is designed to reconcile conflicting or noisy signals into high-quality training data. The platform includes tools for guided error analysis, model-agnostic fine-tuning, and a no-code interface for non-technical domain experts to contribute their knowledge.

The company also offers specialized services and evaluation frameworks to support production-grade AI. Snorkel Expert Data-as-a-Service provides access to a network of professionals with advanced degrees to generate and validate complex datasets for high-stakes industries such as finance, medicine, and law. Additionally, Snorkel Evaluate allows organizations to assess the performance of frontier models and agentic systems using custom benchmarks and scoring rubrics. The firm's solutions cater to Fortune 500 companies and government agencies, supporting use cases like contract intelligence, news analytics, and the development of specialized AI copilots.