Case Study: Vulcan Inc. achieves 95% annotation quality and faster wildlife AI processing with Sama

How Vulcan is Using AI for Wildlife Conservation

Vulcan Inc., the Seattle-based organization founded by Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen, tasked its Vulcan Impact team with using AI to monitor and protect wildlife across sub-Saharan Africa. The team faced a shortage of diverse, high-quality training data from UAV footage—objects like cows differ by region and vast hours of video made manual review slow and error-prone—so Vulcan Inc. partnered with Sama for dedicated data annotation and the Sama labeling tool.

Sama trained a subject-matter-aware annotation team to produce high-quality training data at scale, labeling over 600,000 images and achieving a 95% quality SLA. By accelerating turnaround and delivering correctly formatted, accurate annotations, Sama enabled Vulcan Inc.’s machine-learning models to improve remote animal detection, expand monitoring coverage, support faster human-wildlife conflict response, and lay groundwork for predictive ecosystem analytics.

Vulcan Inc.

Gracie Ermi

Research Software Engineer