Hebbia, a startup developing artificial intelligence-powered search tools, today announced that it has raised $30 million in a Series A round led by Index Ventures with participation from Radical Ventures. It is worth noting that investors included Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang (full disclosure: Yahoo! is TechCrunch’s parent company) and Raquel Urtasun, former head of artificial intelligence research at Uber.
CEO George Sivulka says the up-to-date funds will be used to grow Hebbia’s engineering team and “accelerate the development” of Hebbia’s product platform, as well as expand customer acquisition efforts into professional services industries.
When TechCrunch last wrote about Hebbia, the company — founded by a team of AI researchers at Stanford — was using AI techniques to create search and summarization tools that could make meaningful employ of domain expertise. One of these was a Chrome plug-in called Ctrl-F, which modernized Chrome’s search functionality to go beyond text pattern matching to natural language processing and highlight useful information directly within pages.
Now, after something of a breakthrough, Hebbia is launching a up-to-date AI-based product aimed at deep document analysis: a “neural” search engine. Launched today, it can view billions of documents simultaneously, including PDFs, PowerPoints, spreadsheets and transcripts, to answer questions such as “What are the biggest acquisitions in the supply chain industry in the last five years?”
“With Hebbi you can bring your own data or search a trusted… master data repository that we have already indexed for you: earnings transcripts, news, [meeting] minutes, SEC filings, recently adopted regulations, scientific research and more,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. “[There’s more] trust and transparency in what corpus informs your search results.”
The inspiration to create the neural search engine came from Sivulka’s personal experiences. During his doctoral studies, Sivulka says that many of his friends who worked in finance had to sort through thousands of documents in a 100-hour work week. Artificial intelligence, in his opinion, could solve this problem or at least improve some basic processes.
It’s early days. However, Sivulka says Hebbii’s search engine is quickly gaining popularity among financial services firms, which employ it for due diligence and other investment stages.
“Hebbia currently has 20 paying enterprise customers, including some of the world’s largest private equity firms, hedge funds, consulting firms and government projects,” the spokesman continued.
Modern York-based Hebbia, which currently employs 15 people, expects to double its workforce by the end of the year.