We already know how vital it is to have high-quality data to use in large language models (LLM), but preparing data for models was an early challenge for corporations and an opening that represents an opportunity for the enterprising entrepreneur.
Enter Illumexa two-year-old Israeli startup from the former VP of AI at Sisense. The startup uses GenAI to prepare data for LLM. Today, the company announced a $13 million investment.
Inna Tokarev-Sela, founder and CEO of Illumex, says she recognized this data readiness problem years ago and founded Illumex to make it easier for organizations to organize their data in an automated way.
“We automatically associate an organization’s business logic, automatically map it to data, and provide relevant data to the questions business users have,” Tokarev-Sela told TechCrunch.
To achieve this, the company combines a range of technologies, including generative AI, graph databases, and relational databases, combining all of that information into what Tokarev-Sela calls a data structure that corporations can access for LLM training and other purposes.
He sees the company as a part of a continuum of AI workflows, not only preparing data for models, but also building applications on top of that data and ultimately deploying it to make it easier for end users to interact with the data Illumex provides and get what they need.
“We connect to all systems such as various business applications and various business data sources such as databases, warehouses, data lakes, CRM, support systems, SAP enterprise financial systems and so on. Thanks to this, we are able to include the entire data description and the entire workflow logic and description, tightly linked automatically in this knowledge graph,” she said.
She says this permits customers to inventory their entire data landscape. “We’re providing an understanding of the semantics of the entire data landscape, like the semantics of the entire stack, if you will, and then deploying generative AI with a high degree of accuracy and precision and context awareness,” she said.
What’s more, Illumex integrates with existing enterprise communications tools like Teams, Slack and Google Meet, so they do not force users to find a recent way to work in Illumex. The startup has customers using the platform, including highly regulated corporations reminiscent of financial services and pharmaceuticals.
The company currently has 30 employees and will hire more as capital comes in. As a female founder, Tokarev-Sela said she strives to create a parent-friendly company and reports that the majority of the company is female. “When you actually look at the demographics of the company, it’s very different from the slogans. At Illumex, we actually practice what we say,” she said.
The $13 million investment was led by Cardumen Capital, Amdocs Ventures, and Samsung Ventures, with participation from ICI Fund, Jibe Ventures, Iron Nation Fund, Ginossar Ventures, Icon Fund, Today Ventures, and anonymous industry investors.