We now know how important it is to have quality data to use in large-scale language models (LLMs), but preparing the data for the models is an early challenge for companies and an opening for enterprising entrepreneurs.
That's where Illumex, a two-year-old Israeli startup founded by a former VP of AI at Sisense, comes in. The startup is using GenAI to get data ready for LLMs, and today the company announced a $13 million investment.
Inna Tokarev-Sela, founder and CEO of Illumex, says she recognized this data preparation problem years ago and founded Illumex with the goal of making it easier for organizations to organize their data automatically.
“We automatically correlate an organization's business logic and automatically map it to the data, providing business users with the right data to answer their questions,” Tokarev-Sela told TechCrunch.
To achieve this, the company combines a variety of technologies, including generative AI, graph databases, and relational databases, to bring all this information together into what Tokarev-Sela calls a data fabric, which companies can access and use to train their LLMs or for other purposes.
She sees the company as part of a continuum of AI workflows: going beyond simply preparing data for models to building applications based on this data and ultimately deploying them with the goal of making it easy for end users to interact with the data Illumex provides to get what they need.
“We connect to all of our systems – databases, warehouses, data lakes, CRM, support systems, SAP enterprise financial systems – various business applications and various business data sources, so we have all the data descriptions and all the logic and workflow descriptions automatically tightly coupled in this knowledge graph,” she said.
Illumex displays data in the form of graphs that show the various connections between the data. Image courtesy of Illumex
This will enable customers to take inventory of their entire data landscape, she said. “We understand the semantics of the entire data landscape, semanticizing the entire stack so to speak, and deploy generative AI with high precision, accuracy and context awareness,” she said.
What's more, Illumex integrates with existing enterprise communication tools like Teams, Slack, and Google Meet, so users don't have to invent new ways of working within Illumex. Customers using the startup's platform include highly regulated companies, such as financial services and pharmaceutical companies.
The company currently has 30 employees and plans to hire more with the new influx of capital. Female founder Tokarev Sera said she is trying to create a child-friendly company, reporting that women are in the majority. “When you actually look at the demographics of the company, you see that it's completely different from the slogan. At Ilmex, we actually show it in our actions,” 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, Ginnosar Ventures, Icon Fund, Today Ventures, and undisclosed industry angel investors.