Throwing a lasso around the chaos of unstructured content, Instill AI ropes in $3.6 million

Images, video, audio, text, lions and tigers and bears, oh my! Hands in the air if, like me, there’s rarely a day that goes by when you’re not bombarded with such media. On an hourly or sometimes minute-by-minute basis. Yeah, I thought so.

Now let's extrapolate that example of a barrage of data up to an organisational level and the usefulness of Instill AI becomes readily apparent. Quickly. 

While advancements in the field of deep learning have helped in detangling this particularly useful, when leveraged, ball of unstructured data yarn, data tooling hasn’t exactly kept pace. There are some players on the pitch, but often at quite a hefty price, or are centered around proprietary methods that makes for an interoperability nightmare, and cost prohibitive as far as real-world usage by many an organisation goes.

Helping to alleviate this conundrum, London’s Instill AI has raised $3.6 million in a seed round led by RTP Global and supported by Lunar Ventures, existing investor Hive Ventures, and a number of angel investors including Charlie Songhurst, Demetrios Kellari, and Mehdi Ghissassi. According to the company the new capital is earmarked to fund further development of its homegrown solution that’s aimed at raising the bar, and lowering the costs, of extracting previously unseen data, and therefore value, in unstructured data.

“Unstructured data can be more analyzable if AI is more accessible. At Instill AI, we are committed to making this happen. We believe machine learning and AI should be as easy to access as other off-the-shelf cloud services in the software industry today,” explained Instill AI CEO and co-founder Ping-Lin Chang. 

Instead of building a yet-another walled garden, Instill AI is going the open-source route in the hopes that its Versatile Data Pipeline (VDP) project will be the catalyst that seamlessly brings AI into any company’s modern tech stack.

With a low to no-code approach, data and AI teams can start enjoying beers instead of tears together by streamlining the process of distilling the value of unstructured data, and converting unstructured data into meaningful data representations.

But don’t take just my word alone for it, as VDP has racked up some 600+ stars on GitHub since launching just five months prior.

When it comes to the capital behind the deal, RTP Global’s Gareth Jefferies concludes, “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.”