Ex-Amazon duo’s AI startup raises US$12.5 million in Series A funding
ARTIFICIAL intelligence (AI) startup Marqo raised US$12.5 million in a round led by Lightspeed Venture Partners, gaining funds to develop its technology that helps companies search the vast amounts of unstructured data in their systems.
Investors including Blackbird Ventures and January Capital took part in the Series A round, Marqo said on Tuesday (Feb 13). The money will go toward commercialising its search platform.
Unstructured content such as e-mails, customer contracts, product specs, employee handbooks and web server logs makes up as much as 90 per cent of the data on corporate systems, according to IDC. But since it is different from structured content like databases, it has been difficult to search and exploit.
Marqo’s platform lets firms harness that data, allowing them to analyse it and use it for purposes such as e-commerce personalisation or sentiment analysis. The startup says unstructured data is the world’s biggest untapped information resource.
“It’s early days, but mastering unstructured data will be key to success in the AI race,” Jesse Clark, Marqo’s co-founder and chief technology officer, said.
Clark, 40, founded Marqo with fellow Amazon.com alum Tom Hamer, 27, who is now its chief executive officer. The company has raised US$17.8 million so far and is relocating its headquarters to San Francisco, from its bases in London and Melbourne.
The startup uses a so-called vector search technique, which leverages machine learning models. Its commercial product is a managed service on the cloud that it sells to industries like healthcare and e-commerce.
“Vector searches are really powerful in helping enterprises realise the full potential of AI,” Hamer said on the same call. BLOOMBERG
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