We offer our view of Humata because it is part of the total ARK Venture Fund portfolio. To see the most updated portfolio, please click here.
Founded in 2022, in Austin, Texas, Humata is an early-stage AI startup that provides a natural language user interface with which users can extract and summarize key datapoints from across all their organization’s documents.
Humata Co-founder and CEO, Cyrus Khajvandi, is a former Stanford researcher and serial entrepreneur who previously founded Tildamail, dNovo Bio, and Mobius. Co-founder and CTO, Dan Rasmuson, previously co-founded Labelbox, an artificial intelligence (AI) infrastructure startup that has raised over $100 million from a16z, Kleiner Perkins, and First Round.
Humata’s core offering solves a serious problem faced by data-intensive organizations: most enterprise data like PDF documents and emails are unstructured and difficult to query. The promise of large language models (LLMs) is that knowledge embedded in unstructured data can be surfaced easily through a simple chat interface like ChatGPT. But actually doing that via ChatGPT’s large context windows is cost- and speed-prohibitive, and cost declines on that front currently appear to be linear rather than exponential.
Humata’s product can extract knowledge stored in unstructured data by integrating embeddings, summaries, and labels with customers’ documents. By adding that layer of intelligence, Humata can query larger databases of documents more efficiently than ChatGPT, all the while documenting where Humata derived its answers to customer questions. Early customer traction is impressive: within 15 weeks of launch, more than 1 million customers with varied use cases in academia, law, the oil and gas industry, and customer support are using the product.
We believe LLMs will continue their rapid advance assuming training costs continue to decline 70% annually. Humata appears well-positioned to provide a leading document analytics platform that articulates with and enhances the use of the technology.
Disclosures
We offer our view of Humata because it is part of the total ARK Venture Fund portfolio. To see the most updated portfolio, please click here. Holdings subject to change. Not a recommendation to buy, sell, or hold any specific security.
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