Instabase is a technology company headquartered in

San Francisco San Francisco, officially the City and County of San Francisco, is a commercial, Financial District, San Francisco, financial, and Culture of San Francisco, cultural center of Northern California. With a population of 827,526 residents as of ...

. The company provides an applied AI platform that can be used to automate business processes.

History

Instabase was founded by Anant Bhardwaj in 2015, when he was a Ph.D. student at the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

. At MIT, he met several influential mentors who encouraged him to pursue different research projects — one of these projects eventually became Instabase. In July 2015, he dropped out of the Ph.D. program, and moved to San Francisco to raise capital.

Greylock Partners Greylock Partners is one of the oldest venture capital firms, founded in 1965, with committed capital of over $3.5 billion under management. The firm focuses on early-stage companies in consumer and enterprise software. History Greylock wa ...

and

New Enterprise Associates New Enterprise Associates (NEA) is an American-based venture capital firm. NEA focuses investment stages ranging from seed stage through growth stage across an array of industry sectors. With over $25 billion in committed capital, NEA is one of t ...

were the first investors in the company. In 2017, then a 4-person company, Instabase largely remained in the stealth mode when

Martin Casado Martín Casado is a Spanish-born American software engineer, entrepreneur, and investor. He is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, was a pioneer of software-defined networking, and was a co-founder and the chief technology officer of Nicir ...

from

Andreessen Horowitz AH Capital Management, LLC (commonly known as Andreessen Horowitz, or a16z) is an American privately held venture capital firm, founded in 2009 by Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz. The company is headquartered in Menlo Park, California. As of M ...

led the Series A. At that time,

CNBC CNBC is an American List of business news channels, business news channel owned by the NBCUniversal News Group, a unit of Comcast's NBCUniversal. The network broadcasts live business news and analysis programming during the morning, Day ...

reported that Instabase is building a ''"social network for data"''. In 2019, for the first time Instabase officially disclosed its product offerings and customers in an interview with

Bloomberg TV Bloomberg Television (on-air as Bloomberg) is an American-based pay television network focusing on business and capital market programming, owned by diversified information and media private company Bloomberg L.P. It is distributed globally, rea ...

. Bhardwaj in the interview provided details on how the software platform powered by

Artificial Intelligence Artificial intelligence (AI) is the capability of computer, computational systems to perform tasks typically associated with human intelligence, such as learning, reasoning, problem-solving, perception, and decision-making. It is a field of re ...

is helping financial services enterprises such as large banks and insurance companies build customizable workflows for automating their critical business processes such as Invoice Processing,

Lending In finance, a loan is the tender of money by one party to another with an agreement to pay it back. The recipient, or borrower, incurs a debt and is usually required to pay interest for the use of the money. The document evidencing the debt ( ...

, Know your customer (KYC), and Client Onboarding.

Pivot to Deep Learning & Transformers

In 2020, Instabase heavily invested in transformer-based layout-aware language models and creating pre-trained base foundation models which its customers could fine-tune according to their specific requirements in-house. In 2021, Instabase disclosed that its AI platform has fully migrated to using transformer based

deep learning Deep learning is a subset of machine learning that focuses on utilizing multilayered neural networks to perform tasks such as classification, regression, and representation learning. The field takes inspiration from biological neuroscience a ...

architecture under the hood, and announced the launch of several pre-trained base foundation models included as part of the platform, which could be used for understanding any content as part of building workflows for automating business processes.

AI Hub

In 2023, Instabase announced that it is incorporating

Large Language Model A large language model (LLM) is a language model trained with self-supervised machine learning on a vast amount of text, designed for natural language processing tasks, especially language generation. The largest and most capable LLMs are g ...

s in its product with a public launch of AI Hub, a repository of AI apps focused on content understanding and a set of

Generative AI Generative artificial intelligence (Generative AI, GenAI, or GAI) is a subfield of artificial intelligence that uses generative models to produce text, images, videos, or other forms of data. These models learn the underlying patterns and str ...

based tools for building AI applications. As part of AI Hub launch, Instabase announced 3 key product offerings: AI Hub Converse, AI Hub Build, and AI Hub Apps. In an interview with

, Instabase founder Anant Bhardwaj also discussed their partnership with

Open AI OpenAI, Inc. is an American artificial intelligence (AI) organization founded in December 2015 and headquartered in San Francisco, California. It aims to develop "safe and beneficial" artificial general intelligence (AGI), which it defines ...

and use of their

GPT 3.5 Generative Pre-trained Transformer 3 (GPT-3) is a large language model released by OpenAI in 2020. Like its predecessor, GPT-2, it is a decoder-only transformer model of deep neural network, which supersedes recurrence and convolution-based a ...

and GPT 4 models.

Funding

On August 31, 2015

The Wall Street Journal ''The Wall Street Journal'' (''WSJ''), also referred to simply as the ''Journal,'' is an American newspaper based in New York City. The newspaper provides extensive coverage of news, especially business and finance. It operates on a subscriptio ...

reported that Instabase had raised $3.75 million from

and

to build a cloud based hub for running data applications. On June 14, 2017,

reported that Instabase raised a $23.2 million Series A led by

to build social network for data. On Oct 21, 2019,

Bloomberg News Bloomberg News (originally Bloomberg Business News) is an international news agency headquartered in New York City and a division of Bloomberg L.P. Content produced by Bloomberg News is disseminated through Bloomberg Terminals, Bloomberg T ...

reported that Instabase has raised a Series B of $105 million, led by

Index Ventures Index Ventures is a European venture capital firm with headquarters in both San Francisco and London. It invests primarily in tech companies. History Index Ventures has its origins in a Switzerland, Swiss bond (finance), bond-trading firm cal ...

and joined by

Spark Capital Spark Capital Partners, LLC is a multi-stage venture capital firm based in the U.S. with operations in San Francisco, New York, and Boston. Spark is a generalist VC firm with a portfolio that spans verticals such as consumer internet, enterpris ...

, Tribe Capital, SC Ventures, and Glynn Capital, which valued the company at over $1 billion. On the same day, Instabase founder Anant Bhardwaj and Sarah Cannon (a partner at

) appeared on

to discuss the details of what the company does and who are its customers. On June 6, 2023,

reported that Instabase has doubled its valuation to $2B in its latest round of Series C, and the launch of AI Hub, a

based platform for content understanding. In an interview with

, Instabase founder Anant Bhardwaj discussed the launch of AI Hub, the current macro environment, and their partnership with

Acquisitions

On February 14, 2018, Instabase announced that it had acquired Cloudstitch, a web development platform that uses spreadsheets as the back-end.

References

External links

* * {{URL, https://aihub.instabase.com/ Technology companies established in 2015 Software companies based in California Companies based in San Francisco 2015 establishments in California 2015 establishments in the United States Software companies of the United States Software companies established in 2015 American companies established in 2015