Manu Sharma

Manu Sharma is co-founder and CEO of Labelbox, the training-data platform he started in 2018 with Brian Rieger and Daniel Rasmuson after years building computer-vision systems at DroneDeploy and Planet.

Aerospace roots and early products

Born in Roorkee, India, Sharma studied aerospace engineering at Embry-Riddle and later Stanford. On his personal about page he describes balloon near-space camera launches, renewable-energy experiments with Rieger, and Ardulab, an open-source system for ISS research developed during Singularity University. He also learned to fly with Dick Rutan in Mojave, a detail he still calls one of the most important experiences of his life.

DroneDeploy, Planet, then Labelbox

As an early engineer at DroneDeploy he built CoPilot for flying drones over LTE, then moved into product and helped create the app marketplace with Rasmuson. At Planet he worked on analytics for a satellite constellation imaging Earth daily. That path, watching teams struggle to label imagery for vision models, led to Labelbox with Rieger and Rasmuson. The company raised substantial venture funding and became a core labeling vendor for enterprise AI teams.

On data as the bottleneck

Sharma's public framing is that model quality is gated by training data workflows, not only by architecture. Labelbox's product surface (annotation, workflows, and data tooling) is that claim turned into a company.