Prolific
👤 Ekaterina Damer & Phelim Bradley (Two Oxford/Sheffield PhDs who lived the pain of junk study data — so they vetted the supply side rivals ignored. Bradley now CEO.)🌐 siteLinkedInLinkedIn
Built to fix junk academic survey data. Then the AI boom made 'verified humans' the scarcest input in tech.
Will it work? · our read
Vetted supply wins. The moat isn't code — it's a decade-built pool of ID-verified, fairly-paid humans. AI labs now pay far more for that pool than academics ever did.
01How the money moves
Researcher or AI lab funds a study or annotation task
→
Vetted participants complete it, paid a fair wage (about 70%)
→
Prolific keeps a 33-43% platform fee on top
02The numbers
about $18M
2024 revenue
Latka
42.8%
corporate take rate
prolific.com
200K+
active participants
prolific.com
GMV (participant payouts) is far larger and pass-through; the platform fee is the real revenue. Prolific pricing
about $18M rev (2024, Latka) · participant payouts far larger (GMV)
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Latka — about $18.2M revenue, 3K customersSacra — estimates about $350M annualized by 2026 (AI-data surge)Partech — £25m ($32M) Series A, 2023Prolific — pricing: 42.8% corporate / 33.3% academic feeEnSpire Oxford — Ekaterina Damer founder interview
Revenue is not officially disclosed. Latka cites about $18M (founder-shared, unverified — treat as estimate). Sacra estimates roughly $350M annualized by 2026 on the AI-data surge — a third-party estimate, not a filing, so I did not headline it. Participant payouts (GMV, tens of millions of pounds) are pass-through, not revenue; the 33-43% fee is the revenue. Prolific bootstrapped 2014-2019, then took YC (2019) and a $32M/£25M Series A (2023) — not a pure bootstrap. The 4x data-quality edge over MTurk comes from peer-reviewed studies, not Prolific marketing. No fabricated drama: the win is a decade of unglamorous supply-side vetting that the AI boom repriced. We never score you.