Vectara announces recent funding rounds totaling $53.5 million
and introduces Mockingbird, a new large language model ideal for
high-accuracy tasks in the health, legal, finance, and
manufacturing industries.
Vectara, the trusted Generative AI product platform, has closed
a $25 million Series A round led by FPV Ventures and Race Capital.
Additional investors include Alumni Ventures, WVV Capital, Samsung
Next, Fusion Fund, Green Sands Equity, and Mack Ventures. This
funding round, combined with last year’s $28.5 million seed funding
round, brings the total funding to $53.5 million, aimed at
advancing the state of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) as a
Service for regulated industries.
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Source: Vectara
With this funding, Vectara will advance internal innovations,
ramp up its go-to-market resources and expand its offering in
Australia and EMEA regions. As part of the round, Pegah Ebrahimi,
co-founder and managing partner of FPV Ventures, will join
Vectara’s board of directors.
“At FPV we want to partner with founders who are building
technologies that address the opportunities and risks associated
with generative AI,” said Pegah Ebrahimi, Co-Founder and Managing
Partner of FPV Ventures. “There are specific challenges unique to
enterprises when it comes to implementing LLMs that I saw
first-hand as a former CIO, from accuracy to safety to cost.
Vectara’s RAG-as-a-service is uniquely positioned to solve this,
enabling anyone in any size enterprise to ship real value add use
cases more efficiently.”
Introducing Mockingbird for RAG Technology
As part of its ongoing commitment to innovation, Vectara is
excited to unveil Mockingbird, a new, fine-tuned generative Large
Language Model (LLM) specifically designed for RAG applications.
Mockingbird is engineered to reduce hallucinations and improve
structured output, providing reliable performance with low latency
and cost efficiency.
Combining Mockingbird with Vectara's Hughes Hallucination
Evaluation Model (HHEM) makes it particularly beneficial for
regulated industries such as health, legal, finance, and
manufacturing, where accuracy, security, and explainability are
critical. As the demand grows for AI integration with downstream
systems and the use of functional calls for autonomous agents,
Mockingbird's ability to produce structured outputs will be a
significant advantage.
“Vectara’s new Mockingbird took HuckAI from being an overly
polite librarian to giving answers I would expect from a senior
coworker,” said Founder of HuckAI Sunir Shah. “The responses are
clearer, easier to follow, and provide direct answers to difficult
questions, helping our users get more work done. I switched
immediately.”
Unlike general-purpose LLMs, Mockingbird is tailored to meet the
specific demands of RAG, delivering superior performance and
operational excellence. For RAG output quality, Mockingbird
surpasses GPT-4 by 26% in Bert-F1, demonstrating its unparalleled
capability. With faster performance, Mockingbird sets a new
benchmark in operational excellence, integrating seamlessly within
Vectara's ecosystem and ensuring reliable performance and increased
security without any third-party dependencies.
“The company’s push into models is an interesting move – others
have been resistant to invest in an area well held by leaders like
OpenAI. But it highlights limitations in both the high cost and
genericism of the most performant public models and should put
Vectara in a position to offer more control and deployment
flexibility as the market demands it,” said S&P Global’s
Melissa Incera. “Data from our upcoming Voice of the Enterprise: AI
& Machine Learning, Infrastructure survey shows a
year-over-year increase in organizations primarily deploying
generative AI via end-to-end services and software providers as
opposed to those building from scratch.”
The Pioneer of Retrieval Augmented Generation
“Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) has swiftly become a
cornerstone of enterprise AI strategies. We are immensely proud to
see Vectara being embraced by countless enterprise customers,
machine learning developers, and prompt engineers. Vectara is on
track to become the industry standard for RAG, especially for
regulated industries, and we are thrilled to expand our support and
investment in this journey,” said Alfred Chuang, General Partner at
Race Capital.
AI hallucinations remain a critical concern across various
industries, especially in regulated sectors. Vectara has already
made significant strides in addressing this issue through its
industry-first open-source Hughes Hallucination Evaluation Model
and leaderboard, which thousands utilize to mitigate
hallucinations. Mockingbird represents a significant advancement
toward driving accuracy in AI-generated answers and minimizing the
risks associated with hallucinations.
“The recent $25 million Series A funding will enable us to
further innovate and expand our offerings, ensuring we continue to
lead the way in trusted generative AI technology,” said Amr
Awadallah, Co-Founder and CEO of Vectara. “With Mockingbird, we’re
not just pushing the boundaries of AI trustworthiness; we’re
empowering regulated industries to leverage reliable AI solutions
with confidence, paving the way for a future where AI can be a
dependable partner in mission-critical tasks.”
Several investors have returned to contribute to the Series A
funding round, further proving their commitment to the vision and
solidifying their view of the massive opportunity ahead for RAG.
Early investors in Vectara include Race Capital, Databricks
Ventures, Feld Ventures, GTM Capital, Fusion Fund, Top Harvest
Capital, BECO Capital, Vertex, Essence, and Spark Labs. This
funding brings the company’s total financing to $53.5 million.
About Vectara
Vectara is an end-to-end platform for embedding powerful
generative AI features into applications with extraordinary
results. As an end-to-end Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG)
platform, Vectara delivers the shortest path to a correct
answer/action through a safe, secure, and trusted entry point.
Vectara never trains on your data, allowing businesses to embed
generative AI capabilities without the risk of data or privacy
violations. To learn more, visit vectara.com.
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Carly Bourne carly@bulleitgroup.com