Instill AI, a startup providing tools to derive insights or generate meaningful content from unstructured data (image, video, audio, text), has raised $3.6M in a seed round, led by venture capital firm RTP Global. The funding will help the startup build on its mission to help organisations extract untapped value from unstructured data, by making AI more accessible to companies of all sizes.

This round is also supported by Lunar Ventures; returning investor Hive Ventures; Charles Songhurst, former corporate strategy executive and M&A execute at Microsoft; Demetrios Kellari, Head of Systems and Technology Integration at Cavnue; and Mehdi Ghissassi, Director of Product for Google's AI/ML Research org. In its pre-seed round, Instill AI was also supported by Cornerstone Ventures.

While deep learning has shown its strength in understanding unstructured data in recent years, data tooling has not yet caught up. Despite the emergence of new tools, the implementation and deployment of an effective AI solution in an organization’s data stack is still extremely costly and complex. Building in-house AI solutions requires huge investment and relies on multifunctional teams. As a result, only large enterprises with abundant resources can successfully build exclusive functionalities and components to process their unstructured data and then, distill business insights or deliver AI applications.

The other problem is that while emerging MLOps tools and AI services make tapping the value of unstructured data possible, they provide different proprietary frameworks. This causes difficulties for AI practitioners as they piece them together to build a custom end-to-end solution and integrate with the existing stack. The result? Team silos and inefficiencies.

To solve this problem, Instill AI has introduced its open-source project — Versatile Data Pipeline (VDP) for unstructured data ETL (Extract, Transform and Load), that seamlessly brings AI into the modern data stack. The company provides modern Data and AI teams with no-/low-code tools to streamline the process of distilling the value of unstructured data, converting unstructured data into meaningful data representations. By integrating Instill AI’s solution into their data stack, Data and AI teams can glean richer insights, uncover unknown patterns, develop AI applications faster, and work more efficiently — free from siloes. The community is impressed; in just five months, VDP has gained 600 stars on GitHub since its launch.

The investment will enable Instill AI to launch, later this year, a fully managed cloud service of VDP, to remove the stress of infrastructure maintenance for community members. To accomplish this, Instill AI is expanding its hiring efforts and aims to double its headcount by the end of 2023.

Ping-Lin Chang, CEO and Co-founder of Instill AI, said: “Unstructured data can be more analyzable, if AI is more accessible. At Instill AI we are committed to making this happen. We believe that machine learning and AI should be as easy to access as other off-the-shelf cloud services in the software industry today. This seed investment helps us speed up the development and strengthen the readiness of the VDP, bringing us one step closer to making the solution to this problem a reality.”

Gareth Jefferies, partner at RTP Global, commented: “Having first-hand experience of the pain that comes with deploying AI services, Ping-Lin and his co-founder Xiaofei found a way to help companies of all sizes overcome that pain and seamlessly bring AI into the modern data stack to unlock the value of unstructured data. We were really impressed by the approach the team at Instill AI are taking and can’t wait to see what they achieve in the next part of their journey.”

Yan Lee, founder and managing partner at Hive Ventures, added: “It has been a pleasure to work with Ping-Lin and Xiaofei to unleash the insights within the 80% enterprise data that is unstructured. We look forward to working closely with new investors RTP Global and Lunar VC to grow Instill AI’s value to the community.”