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On August 25, 2015, Seattle startup Spare5 announced a $10 million Series A round led by Foundry Group, Madrona Venture Group and New Enterprise Associates (NEA). Its mobile platform paid screened users—called “Fives”—small amounts to complete image-tagging, data-classification, survey and other microtasks for business customers. The announcement was about a human-data marketplace, not a dependable wage, and Spare5 is no longer a current consumer earning service.
What Spare5 announced in 2015
Spare5 was less than a year old when it announced the Series A. The company had spun out of Madrona Venture Labs, described at the time as that studio’s first startup spinout, and reportedly had 13 employees. The new financing followed a reported $3.25 million seed round in late 2014; contemporaneous accounts differ on whether that seed closed in November or December.
GeekWire reported the $10 million announcement, while TechCrunch covered the round and operating model. Reports said the proceeds would expand engineering, design, marketing, community management, customer relationships and the customer-facing organization, as well as the underlying platform.
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| Date | Event |
|---|---|
| October 2014 | Spare5 founded, according to FinSMEs. |
| Late 2014 | Reported $3.25 million seed financing; sources place it in November or December. |
| August 25, 2015 | $10 million Series A announced. |
| January 10, 2017 | Spare5 relaunched as Mighty AI with a further $14 million financing. |
| June 25, 2019 | Uber acquired Mighty AI; terms were not disclosed. |
How the smartphone microtasks worked
Spare5 converted business data problems into short assignments that could be completed on a phone. Users might tag or describe a photograph, create keywords, estimate a product’s price, classify unstructured information, update merchant-listing metadata or answer questions about products and pricing. The company called its contributors “Fives.”
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Tasks were not simply payments for owning or using a smartphone. A business submitted a problem, Spare5 divided it into standardized pieces, and eligible Fives completed the pieces. The platform then evaluated and combined the responses before delivering usable data to the customer.
Screening and quality controls
According to TechCrunch’s 2015 account, signup included an onboarding questionnaire and, at that time, a Facebook connection. Spare5 screened candidates, graded performance and used proprietary algorithms to rank quality, assign work and aggregate multiple answers. The company said the system incorporated academic best practices, but the published reports do not provide a reproducible technical description or independently verified accuracy result.
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Why businesses paid for human judgments
Spare5 sat between data entry, market research, human annotation and artificial-intelligence training. Some tasks required interpretation, context or preference rather than a simple computer calculation. Human responses could make messy information searchable, structured and useful for automated systems.
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- Groupon: used the service to update metadata on merchant listings.
- United Way: used it to improve demographic information about King County.
- Sentient Technologies: used the resulting judgments to strengthen machine-learning systems.
These were examples cited in 2015 reporting, not a list of current customers. Spare5 charged business clients one-time or monthly fees for access to the platform and completed work. Its revenue therefore came from enterprise customers; users were paid a portion of the economics for qualifying tasks, rather than being paid merely for phone activity.
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What users could realistically earn
GeekWire reported typical payments of roughly 2 to 60 cents per task. The range varied with task complexity, accuracy, experience and productivity. More experienced Fives could gain access to more advanced opportunities. Spare5 also said some people had made several hundred dollars, but that statement was not presented as a typical result.
TechCrunch noted that Spare5 declined to provide a typical earnings figure. Because the reports do not establish how long tasks took, the cents-per-task range cannot be converted into an hourly wage. Time spent finding available work, passing qualification checks and learning the system could materially affect results. Task supply, account eligibility and quality grades could also change what a user saw.
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- MEMORIES MADE PICTURE PERFECT: Capture every angle in stunning clarity, from wide family photos to close-ups of friends, with the triple-lens camera on Galaxy A17 5G.
- NEED MORE STORAGE? WE HAVE YOU COVERED: With an improved 2TB of expandable storage, Galaxy A17 5G makes it easy to keep cherished photos, videos and important files readily accessible whenever you need them.³
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Spare5’s own framing was closer to earning small amounts during otherwise idle moments—such as time spent browsing social media or playing games—than to holding a job. There were no guaranteed hours, no reported standard hourly rate and no evidence that the service was intended to replace full-time employment.
Where Spare5 fit among other platforms
The closest contemporary comparisons were Amazon Mechanical Turk and CrowdFlower, which also paid people to perform outsourced human-intelligence or labeling work. Spare5’s proposed distinctions were a mobile-first interface, a more community-oriented experience, matching based partly on skills and interests, and proprietary quality-ranking and aggregation.
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Uber and TaskRabbit were broader on-demand labor comparisons rather than direct product equivalents: they generally connected customers with physical or conventional service work. Spare5’s CEO instead described mobile entertainment as a competing use of contributors’ spare time.
Who founded the company
- Matt Bencke: CEO and former Getty Images senior vice president.
- Daryn Nakhuda: CTO, formerly CTO of TeachStreet and an engineering leader at Porch.
- Patrick O’Donnell: co-founder of Urbanspoon.
- Matt Shobe: co-founder of FeedBurner.
The founding-team details and Madrona Venture Labs origin were reported by GeekWire and FinSMEs.
What happened after the funding
In January 2017, Spare5 relaunched as Mighty AI, shifting emphasis toward training data for computer-vision and natural-language systems. The company announced another $14 million financing in that relaunch; its own announcement called the round Series A1, while later coverage used a different series label. The company’s announcement is available through PR Newswire.
That change clarifies the deeper strategy behind the original app: the consumer-facing microtasks were a way to produce scalable human judgments and labeled data. In June 2019, Uber acquired Mighty AI for its self-driving technology push, according to GeekWire. The available documentation does not establish a verified shutdown date for the original consumer platform, but Spare5 should not be treated as an active 2026 signup or income opportunity.
What the $10 million round did—and did not—mean
The Series A signaled investor confidence in a platform selling human-in-the-loop data services to businesses. It did not demonstrate that ordinary smartphone owners could earn a substantial or predictable income. Reported per-task payments, variable task access and quality screening made Spare5 better understood as paid crowdsourcing for occasional spare time than as employment or a reliable side-income stream.
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