Sacramento-based generative AI processing company Unstructured has raised a $40 million round of venture capital, led by Menlo Ventures and including Vivek Ranadivé, owner and chairman of the Sacramento Kings.
The company was founded in 2022 by CEO Brian Raymond. Its technology allows artificial intelligence to access data from difficult-to-use formats such as HTML and PDFs.
"I was incredibly impressed with Brian and what he's built at Unstructured,” said Ranadivé, in an emailed statement. “By solving the massive data challenge that the promise of Generative AI presents, Unstructured is positioned to be the leader that helps make AI a catalyst for tangible business outcomes."
Unstructured has a team of 39 employees, said spokeswoman Ali Moore. She said the company now has 1,000 paying customers and over 600 companies on a waiting list to get access to the platform.
Unstructured says some 80% of enterprise data lives on formats like HTML, PDF, PNG and CSV. Those formats can be difficult for large language models to access. Unstructured allows access to many formats, and its technology allows users to compartmentalize private data and information for use by large language models for internal use without sharing that data externally.
Unstructured's workforce is fully remote. Its employees are almost all engineers, data scientists and software engineers.
In July last year, Unstructured raised $25 million in a funding round led by Seattle venture capital firm Madrona Venture Group.
Unstructured has now raised a cumulative $65 million. The company said it will use the new capital to grow its team and accelerate development of data preprocessing tools.
Other investors in the new funding round include Databricks Ventures, IBM Ventures, Datastax Inc. CEO Chet Kapoor, Allison Pickens of the New Normal Fund and NVentures, which is Nvidia Corp.’s (Nasdaq: NVDA) venture capital arm. Follow-on investors from the first round included Madrona, Bain Capital Ventures and Mango Capital.
Unstructured’s platform also allows users to update datasets so that large language models have access to new and incoming information and to limit publicly available information, which makes its automation less prone to hallucinations.
Unstructured is a contender in this year’s Sacramento Kings Capitalize Technology competition. It was also chosen by the Sacramento Business Journal as one of a group of Startups to Watch this year.
