Instabase Inc., a data management startup, has today revealed it has secured $100 million in funding to further its product development efforts.
The Qatar Investment Authority led this Series D funding round, with participation from returning investors Greylock Partners, NEA, Andreessen Horowitz, and Index Ventures. According to Bloomberg, this investment values Instabase at $1.24 billion, a decrease from its $2 billion valuation following the previous funding round in 2023.
Based in San Francisco, Instabase offers a platform for handling unstructured data, which refers to information that cannot be easily organized into rows and columns. The platform extracts such information from business documents, standardizes it, and makes it accessible to other applications. This automation saves employees time and reduces the risk of data entry errors.
Instabase can ingest data from PDFs, multimedia files like slides, scanned copies of handwritten notes, and various other records. If a record contains multiple documents, Instabase breaks them down for easier processing. The platform supports over 160 languages and can handle documents up to several thousand pages long.
Users can specify the data points they wish to extract from files using natural language prompts. For example, an employee might instruct Instabase to capture product prices listed in receipts. The platform can also modify extracted data as needed, such as rounding prices to the nearest integer.
Before extracting content from files, Instabase scans them for errors. It can meticulously check accounting spreadsheets for potentially incorrect calculations and identify other types of errors. There is also a tool that allows employees to manually verify data points by comparing them with source documents.
After ingesting a set of records, Instabase can automatically organize them according to user-specified formats. The platform then provides the data to other systems through application programming interfaces.
In addition to its core data extraction capabilities, Instabase offers a chatbot that enables employees to interact with business records via prompts. Users can ask the chatbot to analyze company earnings reports and calculate compound annual growth rates over the past five years. Instabase shows step-by-step explanations of calculations to help users verify results.
Customers with more advanced needs can build their own chatbots. For instance, a retailer could develop a chatbot that answers common product queries based on information in its knowledge base.
"As we move into the AI era, companies cannot fully realize their AI potential without first leveraging and understanding the unstructured data within each organization," said founder and CEO Anant Bhardwaj.
The company plans to use the proceeds from its latest funding round to enhance its data extraction, analysis, and search functionalities.
