The majority of companies struggle to extract value from their data. Several years ago, Forrester reported that between 60% and 73% of data belongs to average companies It is not used for analytics. This is because data is isolated or classified based on technical and security considerations, making it difficult – if not impossible – to apply analytical tools.
Anna Bujawis and Tyler Maran, engineers who previously worked at Y Combinator-backed startups Hightouch (a data synchronization platform) and Fair Square (a tool for health insurance), were inspired to try their hand at solving the data value problem after discovering that many companies were “excluded” from their strategies. Analyzes due to engineering constraints.
“We found that a large portion of the market, especially those in regulated industries like healthcare and finance, had difficulties analyzing data,” Maran told TechCrunch. “The majority of company data doesn’t fit into a database today; it’s sales calls, documents, Slack messages, etc. Given the size of these companies, off-the-shelf data models are usually not enough.
So he founded Bugaois and Maran OmniAIa set of tools that transform unstructured enterprise data into something that data analysis and artificial intelligence applications can understand.
OmniAI syncs with a company’s data storage and database services (e.g., Snowflake, MongoDB, etc.), prepares the data within them and allows companies to run the model of their choice—for example, a large language model—on the data. OmniAI does all of its work in the company’s cloud, OmniAI’s private cloud or on-premises environments, providing virtualized enhanced security, according to Maran.
“We believe that large language models will become essential to enterprise infrastructure in the next decade, and it makes sense to host everything in one place,” Maran said.
Out of the box, OmniAI offers integrations with models including Meta’s Llama 3, Anthropic’s Claude, Mistral’s Mistral Large, and Amazon’s AWS Titan for use cases such as automatically redacting sensitive information from data and building AI-powered applications in general. Customers sign a SaaS contract with OmniAI to enable model management on their infrastructure.
It’s early days. But Omni, which recently closed a $3.2 million seed round led by FundersClub at a $30 million valuation, claims it already has 10 clients, including Klaviyo and Carrefour. Annual recurring revenue is on track to reach $1 million by 2025, Maran said.
“We are an incredibly lean team in a rapidly growing industry,” Maran said. “Our bet is that over time, companies will choose to run models alongside their existing infrastructure, and model providers will focus more on licensing model weights to existing cloud providers.”