Amazon founder and former CEO Jeff Bezos has made a notable investment in another firm focused on the AI sector.

Toloka is based in Amsterdam, and it announced that it has “secured a strategic investment led by Bezos Expeditions, the investment arm of Jeff Bezos, with participation from Mikhail Parakhin – CTO of Shopify.

It comes as Amazon is already spending heavily on AI, and the Jeff Bezos cloud and e-commerce giant has previously made multiple large-scale investments in AI player Anthropic.

Toloka investments

But now Jeff Bezos’ personal investment firm (Bezos Expeditions) has led a funding round in artificial intelligence data solutions providers Toloka.

Toloka specialises in training and evaluating AI models with the assistance of a network of human experts and testers.

“As part of this round, Mikhail (Parakhin) joins Toloka’s Board of Directors as a Chairman,” wrote Olga Megorskaya, founder and CEO of Toloka. “Nebius, our longtime strategic partner, continues to support Toloka as a shareholder, while no longer having controlling voting power.”

“For many years, Toloka has served as a trusted data partner for global technology leaders, including Anthropic, Amazon, Microsoft, poolside, Recraft, Shopify, and more,” wrote Megorskaya. “Evolving from our roots as a general-use crowdsourcing platform, we’ve transformed data production from simple data annotation tasks to PhD-level domain expertise for LLM development, and expanded to virtual environments where experts test AI agents. As our business evolves, one thing remains unchanged: human input is essential in AI development.”

“On this path, we welcome the support of our new investors. Jeff Bezos’ backing of Toloka, combined with Mikhail’s technological vision and Nebius’ long-term support is a strong validation of Toloka’s traction, potential and ambitions,” wrote Megorskaya.

“This investment will power the development of hybrid human-AI solutions driven by our unique blend of automation and human expertise to shape a future of safe, reliable, and human-centric AI.”

Yandex spin-off

Toloka told Reuters on Wednesday that Bezos Expeditions is leading the $72-million investment, as the firm looks to scale up its business.

Indeed, Megorskaya told Reuters the Bezos-led strategic investment was a milestone that should accelerate the company’s growth, particularly in the US market, and support its development of products through human experts collaborating with AI agents.

Reuters noted that Amsterdam-based Nebius emerged from a $5.4 billion deal, finalised last year, that split the domestic and international assets of Russian internet giant Yandex in the largest corporate exit from Russia since Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine.