Labelbox, a San Francisco company that supplies training data to AI labs and enterprises, acquired Upcraft, a Chicago startup that builds AI agents for sales teams. Labelbox announced the deal on February 10, 2026.
Terms were not disclosed. Upcraft's team is joining Labelbox, where it will work on how the company finds, recruits and keeps in touch with the experts in Alignerr, Labelbox's network of specialists who help train and evaluate AI models.
Greg Caplan, Upcraft's co-founder and chief executive, is joining with the team. Labelbox did not say whether Upcraft's sales product will continue to be offered to outside customers.
What Upcraft built
Upcraft was founded in 2021 and is based in Chicago. It built AI agents that automate parts of the sales process that usually take up a salesperson's time, including outreach to prospects, qualifying leads and keeping up engagement. According to Labelbox, the agents were designed to let sales teams personalise outreach at scale while lowering operating costs.
Caplan said the team had spent nearly five years building Upcraft before the sale. In the announcement he thanked the company's investors, partners and staff, but neither company named Upcraft's backers or said how much money it had raised. Its headcount was also not disclosed.
“After nearly five years building Upcraft, we're thrilled to bring our AI sales agent expertise to Labelbox.”
Why Labelbox is buying
Labelbox sells software, managed services and access to human experts to companies building AI models. Alignerr, its expert network, has more than 1 million domain specialists who produce and review data used to train and evaluate large models, according to the company.
Labelbox said it will apply Upcraft's agent framework to that work, changing how it connects with and activates specialised professionals.
Manu Sharma, Labelbox's chief executive, said building frontier AI requires connecting top domain experts with development teams at scale, and that Upcraft's agent expertise would change how Labelbox grows and runs Alignerr. Caplan said leading growth for Alignerr's expert community was the part of the new role he found most appealing.
The race for expert data
Labelbox presented the deal as part of a wider contest among AI companies to secure expert-generated training data. As model development leans more on post-training and reinforcement learning, the company argued, data produced by domain experts has become more valuable.
Labelbox said it expects Upcraft's technology to help it engage experts more effectively and, as a result, produce higher-quality data for the AI models its customers are building.
What the founders said
In the announcement, Caplan said Labelbox's goal of helping the largest AI labs and cloud providers push toward superintelligence had drawn his team to the deal. Joining a company with more resources and reach, he said, would speed up Upcraft's aim of making AI more accessible and useful.
He said the team planned to use current AI agent technology to engage Alignerr's experts more effectively, which in turn should lead to better training data for the most capable models. Sharma said the Upcraft team would help Labelbox deliver the expert-driven training data its customers rely on, and welcomed Caplan and his colleagues to the company.
Labelbox has been building out its expert business for some time. In July 2025 it published an economic report on the expert workforce behind frontier AI, and its recent product work has focused on evaluating and benchmarking models.
About Labelbox
Labelbox describes itself as a data factory for AI labs and enterprises and says many of the leading US AI labs use its services. Its website notes that it has raised more than $100 million in a Series E round. In 2025 the company published R-ConstraintBench, a benchmark for reasoning in large language models, and launched Evaluation Studio, a product for gathering feedback on model performance.
The Upcraft deal turns a product built for outside sales teams into an internal tool. Labelbox did not say whether it plans further acquisitions.
