Hebbia raised $30 million to launch an AI-powered document search tool

Hebbia, a startup developing AI-infused search tools, today announced that it raised $30 million in an exceedingly Series A round led by Index Ventures with participation from Radical Ventures. Of note, among the investors were Yahoo! co-founder Jerry Yang (full disclosure: Yahoo! is TechCrunch’s parent company) and Raquel Urtasun, a former head of AI research at Uber.

CEO George Sivulka says that the new cash is put toward building out Hebbia’s engineering team and “accelerating development” of its product platform, additionally to expanding its customer acquisition efforts into professional services industries.

When TechCrunch last wrote about Hebbia, the corporate — founded by a team of Stanford AI researchers — was applying AI techniques to form search and summarization tools that would be of specialised domain knowledge. one in all of them was a Chrome plugin called Ctrl-F, which upgraded Chrome’s search functionality to travel beyond text pattern matching with linguistic communication processing, highlighting useful information directly on pages.

Now, after something of a pivot, Hebbia is launching a brand new AI-powered product with a watch toward deep document analysis: a “neural” computer program. Launched today, it can look over billions of documents directly including PDFs, PowerPoints, spreadsheets and transcripts to return answers to questions like “Which are the biggest acquisitions within the supply chain industry within the past five years?”

“With Hebbia, you bring your own data otherwise you search a trusted … primary source repository of knowledge we’ve already indexed for you: earnings transcripts, news, [meeting] minutes, SEC filings, recently passed legislation, research project and more,” a corporation spokesperson told TechCrunch. “[There’s more] trust and transparency around what corpus is informing your search results.”

The inspiration for the neural computer program came from Sivulka’s personal experience. During his doctoral research, Sivulka says that a lot of his friends, who worked in finance, had to scramble over thousands of documents in hundred-hour work weeks. AI, he thought, could solve this problem — or a minimum of streamlining a number of the core processes involved.

It’s a period. But Sivulka says that Hebbia’s programme is finding early traction among financial services firms, which are using it for due diligence and other steps across investment pipelines.

“Hebbia currently counts 20 paying enterprises as customers, including several of the world’s largest private equity firms, hedge funds, consultancies and government projects,” the spokesperson continued.

New York-based Hebbia, which contains a 15-person workforce currently, expects to double its headcount by the tip of the year.