Fundamental, a San-Francisco-based startup that has developed a way to drive predictions from enterprise data, emerged from stealth recently with $255 million in funding.
The company has raised a $30 million seed round plus a $225 Series A led by Connecticut’s Oak HC/FT, with participation from other venture capital outfits including Valor Equity Partners, Battery Ventures, Salesforce Ventures and Hetz Ventures, plus a handful of angel investors such as Perplexity AI’s CEO Aravind Srinivas.
At the heart of the Fundamental proposition is an AI tool that can make sense of spreadsheets, an area where large language models struggle. The company is billing its innovation as a large tabular model called Nexus.
“We’ve built a generalized foundation model specifically to leverage the world’s most valuable data: the billions of tables that underpin predictions in every enterprise, across every vertical,” Jeremy Fraenkel, CEO and co-founder, said in a press release. “Nexus is the OS for business decisions.”
LLMs and related architectures are generally optimized for unstructured, sequential data such as text, images and video, according to the company. They’re less suited to tabular data, which is made up of non-sequential, non-linear relationships including data found in spreadsheets and tables commonly used at large enterprises.
Nexus aims to address this pain point. The tool, which Fundamental said has been built by alumni of Google’s DeepMind, was developed from the ground up on “billions of tabular datasets” and trained on Amazon SageMaker HyperPod, endowing it with the ability to make sense of the non-linear relationships and interactions that exist across rows and columns.
The company also claims to easily integrate into customer data stacks. Once connected, the tool automatically starts learning patterns and structures of the relevant data with no manual training.
“The significance of Fundamental’s model is hard to overstate — structured, relational data has yet to see the benefits of the deep learning revolution,” said Annie Lamont, managing partner at investor Oak HC/FT, in the press release. “[The] ability to predict anything from financial fraud to hospital readmission to energy prices positions the company to support virtually every industry and sector.”
Fundamental has also forged a partnership with Amazon Web Services that will allow customers to deploy Nexus in their AWS environment.
