Copy to AI for practice, AI Data Company Idler Raises $9 Million

Perceive Beating AI News Flash, AI data company Idler has completed a $9 million seed round of financing, led by Paradigm with participation from Y Combinator, Long Journey Ventures, and others. It mainly provides top-tier model companies with evaluation, benchmarking, and reinforcement learning environments, allowing AI to repeatedly perform tasks and receive feedback in scenarios close to real-world work, and then continue training.

Idler was previously focused on Coding. Over the past year, it has created thousands of programming evaluations and training environments for a top AI lab. Public information from YC also indicates that Idler has secured multi-million dollar contracts with a leading foundational model laboratory.

Now it is expanding this approach to real-world enterprise work. The first public benchmark, ShelfLife, directly transforms an operational retail company into a "digital twin." The official website currently offers 200 tasks, with data derived from nearly a decade of real operational records from this company. Claude Opus 5 has the highest pass rate at 69.0%; GPT-5.6 Sol is at 55.7%.

Idler also used 41 of these ShelfLife tasks to train the NVIDIA Nemotron 3 Nano, increasing its performance on the Finance Agent Benchmark from 30.0% to 41.8%.

In addition to retail, Idler has begun creating real work environments for enterprise law, aiming to shift model training from "answering questions" to "doing tasks."