Ex-Googlers, Amr Awadallah, Amin Ahmad, and Tallat Shafaat, successfully raised $28.5 million seed funding to accelerate the development of their innovative AI-based conversational search platform, Vectara. Founded with the objective of helping enterprises access valuable data insights from their text-based files, Vectara aims to simplify the process of building conversational AI apps capable of retrieving and summarizing text from extensive corporate data stores. This funding round was led by Race Capital, featuring participation from Emad Mostaque, the founder of Stability AI.
Launched in late May, Vectara’s AI-powered, API-based search technology claims to handle queries of any length, language, and level of ambiguity across multiple multilingual documents. According to Awadallah, the platform empowers developers to create world-class conversational AI tools with easy retrieval, data privacy, and summarization functionality.
The rise in demand for advanced search technology like Vectara is fueled by the exponential growth of data storage in businesses. An estimated 60% to 73% of data in corporations goes unanalyzed for valuable insights, according to a Forrester study. With the ability to summarize data with citations to the source, Vectara offers real-time ingestion of new documents that ensures seamless, transparent, and continuous access to critical company data.
Ahmad emphasized on the effectiveness of their AI models by stating, “We train [our AI] on a wide variety of publicly licensed sources of data taken from the internet (e.g. Wikipedia) and other sources, [and] we mitigate inaccuracy and bias by constraining our AI models to retrieve the most relevant content from data sets that our customers have chosen to index.”
The platform allows admins to control data utilization while maintaining a high level of governance. Vectara intends to revolutionize user interfaces by efficiently applying conversational AI in apps and websites. Awadallah explains that companies such as Metus, Oncotelic Therapeutics, Apex Chat, and Conversica have already adopted Vectara’s technology for legal discovery, ecommerce search, news monitoring, and financial analysis purposes.
Based in Cupertino, California, Vectara currently has 24 employees and plans to use the seed funding to expand its engineering and sales teams, with a primary focus on European, Middle Eastern, and Asia-Pacific regions. In order to surpass prominent competitors like Amazon Kendra, Microsoft SharePoint Syntex, and Coveo, Vectara will need to leverage the rapidly growing cognitive search market, with a valuation that’s expected to reach $15.28 billion by 2023, a significant growth from $2.59 billion in 2018 (source: Markets and Markets).
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