Nepal’s CloudFactory gets series A funding to grow assembly line of ‘cloud workers’

Nepal-based CloudFactory, which allows businesses and individuals to outsource web tasks to workers in emerging markets around the globe, today revealed that it has secured US$3 million in series A funding. It comes after US$700,000 in seed funding in September 2012.

The series A funding is led by VRBO founder David Clouse, along with other angel investors. The money will go towards its US-based sales and marketing team.

CloudFactory is a bit like the Amazon Mechanical Turk marketplace, which was launched way back in 2005. But CloudFactory insists that it works better because it’s curated, not crowdsourced. The startup describes it as a virtual assembly line. It also promises that its system can scale to larger tasks.

“Crowdsourcing is a broken labor model,” says Clouse in a statement. “You can’t build an enterprise-grade business on top of a crowdsourced marketplace, where both the employers and the workers waste most of their time navigating the chaos. Cloud labor is the future of work, but delivering on that requires a new approach and a new type of workforce — with CloudFactory leading the way.”

The cloud workers are tasked with things like flagging bad content, inputting data, transcribing audio, fixing optical character recognition, or tagging images.

Mark Sears, CloudFactory’s founder and CEO, tells Tech in Asia that this cloud factory now has over 3,200 workers who process over a million tasks per day. It was started up in 2008 when Sears, a Canadian, came to Nepal with his wife on a two-week vacation that never quite ended. The startup remains based in Kathmandu, Nepal’s capital, and hires cloud workers based in Nepal and Kenya.