Trajectory Raises $45M Series A, Hits $300M Valuation for AI Training

Trajectory, a one-year-old artificial intelligence startup, raised $45 million in a Series A round that values the company at $300 million, according to TechCrunch, which reported the round Nov. 2, 2026.

How much did Trajectory raise, and who funded it?

The $45 million Series A was led by Sequoia, with participation from Nvidia, Bessemer Venture Partners and Bain Capital Ventures, TechCrunch reported. The resulting $300 million valuation applies to a company that is, by its own founders' account, about one year old.

What problem is Trajectory trying to solve?

Current large language models, whether built by OpenAI, Anthropic or on open-source foundations, share a limitation: they do not learn from their mistakes without additional training, according to the outlet. Businesses that want models to perform specialized work in fields such as law and finance typically fine-tune general-purpose models, which TechCrunch reported often requires either internal research teams or expensive outside consultants known as forward-deployed engineers.

Co-founder Ronak Malde described the gap this way:

"[A foundational model is] a very smart PhD student who's always starting a new job. But what the economy values is someone who worked on the job for 30 years," Malde told TechCrunch.

How does Trajectory's continual-learning platform work?

According to TechCrunch, businesses connect an open-source model to Trajectory's platform and link it to their applications, which lets the system collect feedback on how the model performs on real tasks. Trajectory then uses that feedback to retrain the model, aiming to improve its performance on specialized work over time. Malde said the people using the platform decide "what good looks like for their organization and can turn that into improvements for their model," per the report.

How large is the company, and who started it?

Trajectory has 18 employees, TechCrunch reported, and was founded roughly a year ago by three Stanford classmates with prior experience at Google DeepMind and Apple. The startup is now making its post-training platform publicly available, according to the outlet.

Which companies are already using Trajectory?

TechCrunch reported that Harvey and Rogo are using Trajectory's platform to post-train open-source models so they perform tasks such as reviewing specific types of legal contracts or valuing companies using a defined methodology. Other customers listed in the report include Decagon, Mercor and Nvidia — the last of which is also a Series A investor.

What safety concerns does the approach raise?

TechCrunch reported that Trajectory's method shares similarities with recursive self-improvement, the idea that AI systems can improve their own capabilities without human input. Co-founder Michael Elabd told the outlet that keeping humans involved in the training loop makes Trajectory's approach safer, arguing that fully autonomous self-improvement could lead to unintended outcomes. The company considers Thinking Machines Lab, founded by former OpenAI CTO Mira Murati, among competitors working on automated post-training, according to the report.

No figures on usage volume, revenue, or the number of models deployed through the platform were disclosed in the sourcing reviewed for this report.