Hebia, a maker of AI-powered search tools, announced today that it has raised $30 million in a Series A round with participation from Radical Ventures, Index Ventures. Among its investors are Yahoo! Co-founders Jerry Yang (full disclosure: Yahoo! is the parent company of TechCrunch) and Raquel Urtasun, former head of AI research at Uber.
CEO George Sivolka said the new money will be used to build Hebian’s engineering team and “accelerate” its product platform, in addition to expanding its customer acquisition efforts into the professional services industry.
When TechCrunch last wrote about Hebia, the company — founded by a team of AI researchers at Stanford — was applying AI techniques to create search and inference tools that can understand domain-specific knowledge. One of them is a Chrome plugin called Ctrl-F, which enhances Chrome’s search function and goes beyond text pattern and natural language processing to highlight important information directly on pages.
Now, after some pivots, Hebia is launching a new AI-powered product with an eye toward deep document analysis: a “neural” search engine. It started today with a question like “What are the biggest acquisitions in the supply chain industry in the last five years?” It can simultaneously view billions of documents, including PDFs, PowerPoints, spreadsheets, and transcripts, to find answers to existing questions.
“With Hebia, you bring your own data or you look for a trusted one…the primary data repository we’ve already suggested for you: earnings transcripts, news, [meeting] Minutes, SEC filings, recently passed laws, scientific research and more,” a company spokesperson told TechCrunch. “[There’s more] Trust and transparency around how Corpus informs your search results.
The inspiration for the neural search engine came from Sivolka’s personal experience. In his doctoral dissertation, Sivolka said many of his friends who worked in finance had to falsify thousands of documents in hundreds of hours of workweeks. He thought that AI could solve this problem – or at least modify some of the core processes involved.
It’s early days. But Sivolka said Hebia’s search engine is finding early interest among financial services firms taking on other investment pipelines for due diligence.
“Hebia currently counts 20 paying enterprises as clients, including many of the world’s largest private equity firms, hedge funds, consultancies and government projects,” the spokesperson continued.
New York-based Hebia, which currently has a workforce of 15, expects to double its headcount by the end of the year.
