VentureBeat’s Transform 2024 Innovation Showcase: Instabase gets most likely to succeed

Instabase was voted most likely to succeed at the Innovation Showcase for VentureBeat’s Transform 2024 event this week.

The AI company is focused on helping accelerate decision making in enterprises by unlocking unstructured data like voice, video, images text messages and more.

Clemens Mewald, head of product at Instabase, said in a presentation that the company’s AI Hub is being used by the world’s largest enterprises across banking, insurance, consumer products and transportation on their most critical business processes. Mewald said that four of the top five banks are using it.

“We can automate all document workflows instantly,” Mewald said. “You can take actions based on insights from all of your data.”

Instabase has 277 employees and has raised $177 million to date, with a valuation of $2 billion. Its tech can unlock any unstructured data, including images, PDFs, Excel, messages and more with its core product AI Hub.

Competitors include, by category, Glean for search, Indico Data for build and various others for chat. Cloud players are also competitive. The company believes it is unique in providing one platform across all the unstructured data modalities, that can be securely deployed in any environment.

The San Francisco-based company was founded in 2015 by MIT PhD drop-out Anant Bhardwaj. His inspiration focused on making sense of highly unstructured siloed data.

Instabase found its first use case in intelligent document processing in banking and insurance (sectors that had high volume/complex use cases). Then it rapidly expanded as technology progressed, which allowed many more use cases in all verticals. The platform was fully re-architected around a large language model (LLM) architecture with the launch of AI Hub on June 6, 2023. The most recent AI Hub modality — search — was announced today.

AI Hub has different modalities for different situations. It can search to generate insights and take actions across all company data and systems. The product can also automate processes where the kind of information needed is always the same, can converse to engage with individual or multiple pieces of content and obtain insights and can chat to retrieve information from a large body of content.

Instabase leverages the most advanced LLMs and combines those with proprietary layout-awareness models, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) and vector databases as well as a no-code end-to-end workflow orchestration tool. It enables customers to go from highly unstructured data to automated workflows and insights without any code, instantly.

By combining AI breakthroughs with deep industry expertise and intuitive experiences, Instabase helps organizations accelerate decision making, automate mission-critical processes, and drive transformational outcomes.

The business is backed by several investors, such as Greylock Partners, NEA, Andreessen Horowitz, Index Ventures, Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, K5, Original Capital, SC Ventures and Glynn Capital.

Mewald revealed in a demo that the company has created a search interface that can find answers across mixed data sources. Mewald showed a search for documents about founder Anant Bhardwaj and it found 1,385 documents, listing them and giving direct access to them.

In terms of tasks it can perform, Mewald did a search on vendor contracts that are up for renewal in the next 12 months, then performed an analysis on them. It could suggest which ones should be canceled or renewed.

Mewald said the data can be trusted, as the hub delivers pixel and token-level provenance of where data came from. It has deeper semantic understanding, complex agentic reasoning and actions and federated storage compute and identity.

The panel of judges for the Innovation Showcase included investors Lisa Yu, partner at 99VC; Jeremiah Owyang, general partner at Blitzscaling Ventures; Eugenio Gonzalez, partner at Plug and Play Ventures; and Tim Tully, partner at Menlo Ventures.