Most companies struggle to get value from their data. A few years ago, Forrester reported that between 60% and 73% of data belongs to the average company remains unused for analyses. That's because technical and security concerns keep the data siloed or otherwise pigeonholed, making it difficult, if not impossible, to apply analytical tools.
Anna Pojawis and Tyler Maran, engineers previously at Y Combinator-backed startups Hightouch (a data sync platform) and Fair Square (a health insurance tool), were inspired to try to solve the data value problem after discovering that many companies had been “left out ” of analytics strategies because of the technical roadblocks.
“We found that a significant portion of the market, especially those in regulated industries such as healthcare and finance,” is struggling with data analytics, Maran told JS. “The majority of company data today does not fit in a database; it's sales calls, documents, Slack messages and so on. And given the size of these companies, ready-made data models are usually not sufficient.”
So Pojawis and Maran founded OmniAIa set of tools that transform unstructured business data into something that data analytics and AI apps can understand.
OmniAI syncs with a company's data storage services and databases (e.g. Snowflake, MongoDB, etc.), prepares the data therein, and allows companies to run the model of their choice (e.g. a large language model) on the data. OmniAI performs all its work in the company's cloud, OmniAI's private cloud, or on-premise environments, which Maran says provides what appears to be improved security.
“We believe that large language models will become essential to a company's infrastructure over the next decade, and having everything hosted in one place just makes sense,” said Maran.
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 generally building AI-powered applications. Customers sign a software-as-a-service contract with OmniAI to enable management of models 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 to already have 10 customers, including Klaviyo and Carrefour. Annual recurring revenue is on track to reach $1 million by 2025, Maran said.
“We are an incredibly small team in a fast-growing industry,” said Maran. “Our guess is that over time, companies will choose to run models alongside their existing infrastructure, and model providers will focus more on licensing models to existing cloud providers.”
