From left: Douwe Kiela and Amanpreet Singh. Image: Contextual AI
The start-up was founded last year by former Hugging Face and Meta researchers Douwe Kiela and Amanpreet Singh.
Silicon Valley start-up Contextual AI has raised $80m in Series A funding to invest in its platform that aims to improve the performance of artificial intelligence models.
Based in San Francisco, Contextual AI is behind the development of a technique known as retrieval augmented generation (RAG) which enhances the accuracy and reliability of generative AI models with facts fetched from external sources.
The start-up claims that its own approach to the technology, which it calls RAG 2.0, helps develop “robust and reliable” AI for enterprise-grade performance.
Using RAG 2.0, Contextual AI has created a set of language models that it claims can outperform OpenAI’s GPT-4 and the competing open-source models “by a large margin”.
“Our platform supports a wide range of use cases, from technical customer support to investment research and information discovery,” the start-up wrote in an announcement. “We focus on enhancing high-value knowledge workers in specialised tasks that deliver high return on investment.”
The start-up was founded last year by researchers Douwe Kiela and Amanpreet Singh. Kiela, who is the CEO, is also an adjunct professor in symbolic systems at Stanford University.
Before co-founding Contextual AI, Kiela was head of research at Hugging Face and lead the Meta AI Research team that pioneered RAG, among other AI technologies. Singh has also previously worked at both Hugging Face and Meta.
Qualcomm and HSBC are recent customers of the start-up. “With their RAG 2.0 technology, deep expertise and proven results to date, Contextual AI gives me confidence that we can leverage generative AI to support our team, help our customers design and develop products efficiently, and set new standards for performance and quality,” said Yogi Chiniga, vice-president of customer engineering at Qualcomm.
Contextual AI said the Series A funding will help it scale its operations and meet the “surging demand” for AI in enterprises across the world.
The round was led by existing investors Greycroft and backed by Bain Capital Ventures, Lightspeed, Lip-Bu Tan, Conviction/Sarah Guo and Recall Capital. New investors in the start-up include Bezos Expeditions, NVentures (Nvidia), HSBC Ventures and Snowflake Ventures.
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