Instabase invests $45 million to help businesses automate document processing

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Instabase, a startup that provides an app platform that can be used to understand and analyze “unstructured” data, today announced that Tribe Capital, with the participation of Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), New Enterprise Associates and Spark Capital.

The round values ​​Instabase at $2 billion (double its previous valuation) and comes as the company seeks to increase its investment in generative AI.

“At Instabase, we have built a platform trusted by some of the most demanding global companies in the most highly regulated industries,” Anant Bhardwaj told TechCrunch in an email interview. “Instabase is a platform that enables organizations to apply the latest AI innovations to understand unstructured data and build applications.”

Bhardwaj founded Instabase in 2015 while working on his PhD at MIT. The inspiration, he says, came from the gap he saw in the market for a platform that could quickly build and deploy enterprise apps and data.

In a nutshell, Instabase provides tools to help you understand your content. The platform processes documents and data that companies can use to run their business, querying at once a corpus of large files such as academic papers, legal documents, and financial data.

In addition to this, Instabase provides tools that companies can use to develop workflows for analyzing similar types of documents. For example, a customer can use her Instabase to build an app that automates income and more, identifies verification processes, invoice processing, and receipt verification.

Businesses can also select pre-built apps from Instabase’s marketplace. There are apps for verifying passports and driver’s licenses, verifying personal income, pre-filling tax forms, and more.

“Instabase is continuously identifying and evaluating new AI models and technologies for content understanding,” said Bhardwaj. “With innovation in this space and multiple players entering the market, [generative AI] In racing, it’s important for customers to leverage modular technology that allows them to quickly take advantage of the latest innovations. “

San Francisco-based Instabase has nearly 350 employees and competes not only with startups, but also with incumbents such as Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Azure. All three companies offer cloud-based, AI-powered document processing and workflow automation tools. . Bhardwaj argues that an advantage of Instabase is that it minimizes the need for time-consuming, and often costly and labor-intensive data science work.

For example, according to Bhardwaj, companies using Instabase’s platform need to fine-tune and train their own AI models to automate certain kinds of workflows or build apps. No. Also, you don’t need to annotate documents to get a model to learn how to extract the kind of data you want.

There, some might argue that many of Instabase’s competitors are on par. But that didn’t stop Instabase from getting paying customers. Bhardwaj claims that four of the top five US banks use Instabase, as well as companies in the finance, insurance and consumer goods industries.

Martin Casado, general partner of a16z, said in an email:

“We believe the market is undergoing a massive transformation and the companies that can build deeply integrated and applied AI solutions will win. We’ve applied it consistently, and we’re excited to continue working with Instabase as they embrace this technology and make it accessible to every segment of the market.”