Sama (company)

Sama formerly known as Samasource is a training-data company, focusing on annotating data for artificial intelligence algorithms. The company offers image, video and sensor data annotation and validation for machine learning algorithms in industries including automotive, navigation, augmented reality, virtual reality, biotechnology, agriculture, manufacturing, and e-commerce. Sama's mission is to expand opportunity for low-income individuals through the digital economy. One of the first organizations to engage in impact sourcing, Sama trains workers in basic computer skills and pays a local living wage for their labor.
Additionally, Sama provides health and wellness education, professional skills development, a scholarship program to assist with continuing education costs, and a program to provide micro loans and mentorship to aspiring entrepreneurs. Some of Sama's clients include Walmart, Google, General Motors and Microsoft.
Sama is headquartered in San Francisco, California, with an additional office in New York, New York. The organization owns and operates delivery centers in Nairobi and Gulu, Uganda, and partners with additional delivery centers in India. Sama previously employed workers in Haiti, Pakistan, Ghana, and South Africa.
Business model.
Sama uses a secured cloud annotation platform to manage the annotation lifecycle. This includes image upload, annotation, data sampling and QA, data delivery, and overall collaboration.
Sama's platform breaks down complex data projects from large companies into small tasks that can be completed by women and youth in developing countries with basic English skills after a few weeks of training. In Kenya, Sama offers an immersive hard and soft skill training program to help prepare underserved youth for the workplace. Sama delivery centers follow Sama's social impact guidelines, which includes hiring workers who were previously earning less than the local poverty line, paying a living wage and providing access to benefits. Sama also invests in training, salaries, and benefits for their agents, offering free or subsidized meals, transportation, healthcare, and professional development.
Sama's technology features a five-step quality assurance mechanism that gauges the success of each individual worker. Workers are not, however, in direct competition with one another as they are in crowdsourcing models. Sama's staff also makes a point of understanding the skills native to each region so that it can channel projects to centers best equipped to handle them.
First founded as a non-profit in 2008, Sama adopted a hybrid business model in 2019, becoming a for-profit business with the previous non-profit organization becoming a shareholder.
History.
Entrepreneur Leila Janah founded Samasource (now Sama Group) in 2008. Janah's father sensitized her to the issue of poverty from an early age, and she became interested in global development while teaching English and creative writing in rural Ghana through a high school scholarship. Seeing her students' ambition combined with the rise in global literacy and access to technology during that time provided the initial inspiration for Samasource.
After completing a degree in African Development Studies from Harvard University, Janah worked as a consultant at Katzenbach Partners (now Booz & Company) and at the World Bank. She quickly became disillusioned, however, by the lack of insight she perceived from World Bank officials into the needs of those the organization was attempting to move out of poverty. While working with multiple clients in the outsourcing sector and nonprofit world, Janah developed the business plan for Sama.
The organization received its initial funding from the International Business in Development Challenge and the Stanford Social Enterprise Challenge in 2008, and has received additional funding from grantors including the Mastercard Foundation, the Mulago Foundation, the Peery Foundation and Google.org. The organization has since grown into a team and board with backgrounds in distributed work, economic development, and outsourcing.
Recognition.
Sama has received numerous awards and grants, including the 2012 Secretary's Innovation Award for the Empowerment of Women and Girls and the 2012 TechFellows Award for Disruptive Innovation. The organization was also part of POPTech's 2010 Class of Social Innovation Fellows. Fast Company named Sama as "One of the Most Innovative Companies of 2015", saying that Sama is "defining what it means to be a not-for-profit business". Sama has also been profiled in TechCrunch, Wired, and Business Insider among other publications.
Janah, was included in Conde Nast's Daring 25 list in 2016 and as one of "Five Visionary Tech Entrepreneurs Who Are Changing the World" by "The New York Times Style Magazine" in 2015. She was also named a "Rising Star" on Forbes' 30 Under 30 list in 2011, one of the 50 people who will change the world by Wired, and one of the 100 most creative people in business by Fast Company. She is the recipient of a 2011 World Technology Award, a Social Enterprise Alliance Award, and a Club de Madrid award.