Contextual AI, a Palo Alto, CA-based company advancing a new approach to generative AI for the workplace, raised $20M in funding.
The round was led by led by Bain Capital Ventures with participation from Lightspeed, Greycroft, SV Angel and angel investors including Elad Gil, Lip-Bu Tan, Sarah Guo, Amjad Masad, Harry Stebbings, Fraser Kelton, Sarah Niyogi and Nathan Benaich.
The company intends to use the funds to expand operations, its development efforts and its business reach.
Founded in 2023 by CEO Douwe Kiela and CTO Amanpreet Sing, Contextual AI is creating large language models (LLMs) that are purpose-built for enterprises. With the ability to customize models to each company’s individual data sources, it offers a secure, accurate and efficient way to empower knowledge workers to do their work with efficiency.
Contextual AI’s proprietary research is building on the already established Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) method. In particular, the company will solve the following enterprise challenges:
- Hallucination: LLMs are known to make up information, and what is worse, they do so with very high confidence.
- Attribution: We have no real way of knowing why LLMs say what they say, so we can’t easily double-check their outputs or correct their mistakes.
- Compliance: There is no clear-cut way to remove information from an LLM, or even just to revise it, which makes them risky from a compliance perspective.
- Customization: LLMs should generalize to and be connectable with new data sources on the fly, as the data becomes available.
- Data privacy: Companies should not have to send their valuable private data to somebody else’s API endpoint.
Several Fortune 500 companies are currently in talks about piloting the company’s contextual language models on their own data.
FinSMEs
08/06/2023