Sacramento-based Unstructured.io has raised $25 million in a funding round led by Seattle venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group.
Unstructured, founded in July last year, offers technology to make it easier for customers to access data no matter the file type, document location or layout, so that they can better use artificial intelligence.
“Organizations generate vast amounts of unstructured data daily, which, when combined with large language models (LLMs), can supercharge productivity,” said founder and CEO Brian Raymond, in a news release.
He said data is scattered through numerous types of databases, file formats and document layouts.
“By automating the preprocessing of natural language data, Unstructured eliminates the need for laborious manual preprocessing, removing one of the most time-consuming and expensive bottlenecks data scientists encounter in deploying LLM-based solutions across their organizations," Raymond said.
Also participating in the funding was New York-based Bain Capital Ventures, San Francisco-based M12 Ventures (formerly Microsoft Ventures), Los Altos-based Mango Capital, New York-based MongoDB Ventures and San Francisco-based Shield Capital, Madrona said. As part of the financing, Madrona Managing Director Karan Mehandru and Bain Capital Ventures Partner Enrique Salem joined Unstructured’s board of directors.
"In today’s digital age, the world runs on documents," said Mehandru, in a news release. “From research reports and memos to quarterly filings and plans of action, documents are the unit of information that organizations depend on. And yet, most of this information is trapped in inaccessible formats, and organizations have long struggled to unlock this data, leading to information silos, inefficient decision-making, and repetitive work.”
Unstructured is based in Sacramento, but the company operates largely remotely, said Erika Shaffer, a spokeswoman with Madrona.
“Unstructured’s rapid growth from an idea to working with more than 100 companies in a year is proof that there’s a real market need to eliminate data silos,” said Bain Capital’s Salem, in a news release.
Unstructured says some 80% of enterprise data lives on formats like HTML, PDF, PNG, CSV and others, and those formats can be difficult to access.
In information technology, it is common to need to extract, transform and load, or ETL, data from multiple systems and formats to a single database or storage location. Unstructured.io does ETL for Large Language Models, or LLMs, which are the language processing computer programs underlying artificial intelligence that generates text for things like chatbots, AI search engines and generative AI programs like ChatGPT.
Raymond started Unstructured last year after working for three years as a vice president at PrimerAI, a San Francisco-based company specialized in AI-powered data analysis.
Raymond earned a master’s degree from the University of California Davis before entering the Career Analyst Program with the Central Intelligence Agency, where he worked for five years before working on the National Security Council for a year in the second term of President Barack Obama, according to his LinkedIn profile.
