Armenia’s rapidly growing AI ecosystem has produced another breakout success story. AI data infrastructure startup Wirestock has raised $23 million in a Series A funding round as it doubles down on building ethically sourced multimodal datasets for artificial intelligence models.
The round was led by Nava Ventures, with participation from SBVP, co-founded by Sheryl Sandberg, alongside Formula VC, I2BF Global Ventures, and several strategic investors.
Founded in 2018 by Mikayel Khachatryan, Ashot Mnatsakanyan, Vladimir Khoetsyan, and Hovhanness Kuloghlyan, Wirestock originally started as a platform helping photographers monetize content across marketplaces like Shutterstock.
Today, the company has fully transformed into a major AI infrastructure player supplying multimodal datasets for foundation model training.
Wirestock now provides AI labs with large-scale datasets spanning images, video, music, 3D assets, design content, gaming materials, and spatial data — serving a growing market where AI companies increasingly require high-quality, ethically sourced training data instead of scraped internet content.
The startup says it already collaborates with six major foundation model developers and has surpassed a $40 million annual revenue run rate. More notably, the company has paid out approximately $15 million to creators globally, with creator payouts reportedly growing 20x year-over-year since launching its AI licensing model.
Its platform now connects more than 700,000 creators worldwide, including photographers, filmmakers, musicians, graphic designers, and 3D artists.
As competition intensifies around AI data infrastructure, Wirestock is positioning itself against players like Scale AI, Appen, and Hive AI — while emphasizing transparent licensing, creator monetization, and ethical sourcing as key differentiators.
“Wirestock has built an incredibly versatile platform that orchestrates the creation, curation, and delivery of complex multimodal datasets,” said co-founder and CEO Mikayel Khachatryan. “With all this innovation, we never lose sight of what powers Wirestock — our global community of creators.”
The new capital will be used to expand research, engineering, and product teams, strengthen integrations with leading AI labs, and accelerate development of enterprise-grade tools for multimodal dataset creation and management.
As AI rapidly evolves beyond text-based systems into video, audio, spatial computing, and 3D environments, startups like Wirestock are emerging as critical infrastructure providers powering the next generation of AI models.
