Most corporations struggle to extract value from their data. A few years ago, Forrester reported that the average enterprise accounts for between 60% and 73% of data is not used for analytical purposes. This is because data is isolated or otherwise pigeonholed for technical and security reasons, making the application of analytical tools difficult, if not unattainable.
Anna Pojawis and Tyler Maran, engineers who previously worked at Y Combinator-backed startups Hightouch (a data sync platform) and Fair Square (a medical health insurance tool), found that many corporations were inspired to try their hand at solving the data value problem have been “locked out” from analytical strategies attributable to engineering obstacles.
“We found that a significant portion of the market, especially in regulated industries like health care and finance,” had trouble analyzing data, Maran told TechCrunch. “Most corporate data these days doesn’t fit in a database; it’s sales calls, documents, Slack messages, and so on. Given the scale of these companies, off-the-shelf data models are typically not sufficient.”
This is how they founded Deputies and Marana OmniAIthat is, a set of tools that transform unstructured enterprise data into something comprehensible by data analytics and artificial intelligence applications.
OmniAI syncs with company storage services and databases (e.g. Snowflake, MongoDB, etc.), prepares data in them and allows corporations to run a model of their selection on the data – for example, a multilingual model. According to Maran, OmniAI performs all of its work in the company’s cloud, OmniAI’s private cloud, or on-premises environments, providing seemingly enhanced security.
“We believe that large language models will become essential to a company’s infrastructure over the next decade, and having everything in one place makes sense,” Maran said.
Out of the box, OmniAI offers integration with models including Meta’s Llama 3, Anthropic’s Claude, Mistral’s Mistral Large, and Amazon’s AWS Titan for applications corresponding to robotically redacting sensitive information from data and general AI application development. Customers sign a software-as-a-service contract with OmniAI to enable model management across their infrastructure.
It’s early days. However, Omni, which recently closed a $3.2 million seed round led by FundersClub at a $30 million valuation, says it already has 10 customers, including Klaviyo and Carrefour. Maran said annual recurring revenue is expected to succeed in $1 million by 2025.
“We are an incredibly close-knit team in a rapidly evolving industry,” said Maran. “We assume that over time, companies will choose to run models alongside existing infrastructure, and model providers will focus more on licensing model weights to existing cloud service providers.”