UK’s Instill AI raises €3.3M to help organisations transform unstructured data into actionable insights

London-based Instill AI, a provider of no-/low-code tools to convert unstructured data to meaningful data, announced on Wednesday that it has raised $3.6M (approximately €3.3M) in a Seed round of funding led by RTP Global. 

Lunar Ventures, 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) also participated in the round. 

The company says the latest proceeds will position Instill AI to fund its product and growth development, help organisations extract untapped value from unstructured data, and make AI more accessible to companies of all sizes. 

The UK company says it will use the funds to launch a fully managed cloud service of VDP ( Versatile Data Pipeline) later this year, expand its hiring efforts, and aim to double its headcount by the end of 2023.

Ping-Lin Chang, CEO and Co-founder of Instill AI, says, “Unstructured data can be more analysable if AI is more accessible. At Instill AI, we are committed to making this happen.”

He adds, “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.”

While deep learning has showcased its ability to understand unstructured data lately, data tooling has yet to catch up. Despite the emergence of new tools, implementing and deploying an effective AI solution in a data stack can be extremely costly and complex. 

On the other hand, building in-house AI solutions requires massive financial resources and multiple teams.

Here’s where Instill AI addresses the problem.

Install AI: What you need to know

Founded by Ping-Lin Chang and Xiaofei Du in 2020, Instill AI provides no-/low-code tools to convert unstructured data to meaningful data representations under an open-source project — Versatile Data Pipeline (VDP) for unstructured data ETL (Extract, Transform, and Load).

The company says that organisations can integrate the tool into the data stack and glean richer insights, uncover unknown patterns, develop AI applications faster, and work more efficiently — free from siloes. 

Instill AI claims that VDP has gained 600 stars on GitHub in just five months since its launch.

The investors

RTP Global is a venture capital firm focused on investing in early-stage technology companies. 

Since 2000, RTP Global has partnered with over a hundred founding teams across Europe, Asia and North America, and has grown AUM to more than $2B.

Notable early-stage investments for the firm include Datadog, Delivery Hero, SumUp, Socure, and Cred.

Gareth Jefferies, partner at RTP Global, says, “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.”