Instabase unveils AI Hub, a generative AI platform for content understanding

Applied AI platform Instabase today announced the launch of AI Hub, a comprehensive repository of AI applications focused on content understanding. Powered by generative AI, the company aims to provide self-service solutions within AI Hub, enabling users from diverse backgrounds to harness the potential of powerful AI-driven insights.

According to the company, AI Hub will unlock opportunities for individuals to engage with their content, spanning tax files, insurance claims, receipts, invoices and customer data while receiving expert-level responses.

Furthermore, the company announced the successful completion of its series C funding round, raising an impressive $45 million. The company said that the new funding, announced in late 2022, has propelled Instabase’s valuation to a remarkable $2 billion. Tribe Capital led the investment, with participation from renowned firms such as Andreessen Horowitz, New Enterprise Associates, Greylock Partners, Spark Capital, K5 Global and Standard Chartered Ventures.

“With the latest funding round, we will be increasing our investment in bridging the gap between the hype around generative AI and helping organizations (small and large) apply it to real business problems in content understanding. The AI Hub product launch is the first result of that investment,” Anant Bhardwaj, CEO and founder of Instabase, told VentureBeat.

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One of the initial apps featured in Instabase AI Hub is Converse, a next-gen tool that facilitates interactive conversations, provides answers to queries, and summarizes information from various content types, including documents, spreadsheets and images.

“AI Hub Converse lets you create a conversation with your content to extract insights, analyze, summarize, translate, reason or generate new content. We worked hard to ensure several real-world capabilities are available, such as long documents (no limitations on the length of document), multiple long documents (capability to converse with a large corpus of documents) and hallucination elimination by validating that the answers are anchored to your original content,” Bhardwaj told VentureBeat.

Alongside the launch of Converse, the company will introduce two more offerings: AI Hub Build and AI Hub Apps.

AI Hub Build is a tool designed to facilitate the creation of repeatable end-to-end workflows for documents of similar nature.

AI Hub Apps will feature an app store comprising various pre-built applications. These include passport and driver’s license verification, income verification using pay stubs, bank statements and tax forms. Users can use these apps to simplify and enhance their document-related tasks.

Delivering intriguing content insights through generative AI 

Instabase’s Bhardwaj believes that while LLMs excel in answering general-knowledge questions, they have not effectively addressed queries related to specific content corpora, such as documents, spreadsheets or other unstructured data.

Bhardwaj said the company has identified the potential of combining unstructured data with LLMs to provide value. Therefore, Instabase incorporated OpenAI’s GPT models into its proprietary software, enabling users to inquire about any document, spreadsheet or image without the need for annotation or fine-tuning to achieve human-level performance.

Additionally, the company has closely collaborated with OpenAI to guarantee that its customers can use OpenAI’s large language models (LLMs) while maintaining the highest standards of privacy and security essential for professionals operating in the world’s most regulated industries.

“Instabase utilizes its innovation and expertise in document understanding to create a digital representation of various content, ranging from handwritten notes to spreadsheets. This approach provides the GPT models with a newfound comprehension of structure, style and meaning,” explained Bhardwaj. “The models significantly enhance the platform’s capabilities in understanding documents and substantially reduce the time required to develop automated solutions for repeatable workflows. What used to take a few weeks can now be accomplished within a few minutes.”

Bhardwaj highlighted that the platform’s user-friendly interface, along with the capabilities of GPT models, empowers individuals without technical expertise to handle a diverse range of use cases. This advancement enables companies to tackle scenarios previously unattainable because of resource limitations.

He said that the simplified process not only makes it more accessible but also reduces the upfront investment required.

According to the company, users can automatically process documents through the pre-built apps available in AI Hub. For example, they can take an existing lease contract and generate an amendment that extends the lease by two years, streamlining content creation.

“AI Hub streamlines the end-to-end process for large enterprises, such as banks processing numerous mortgage applications daily. With AI Hub, you can use Converse to quickly retrieve the critical information from each application across digital and handwritten parts of the application, leverage Build to create a repeatable workflow to automate the extraction of these fields and integrate with downstream systems, and publish the app on AI hub for broader usage within the organization,” Bhardwaj explained.

What’s next for Instabase? 

Bhardwaj emphasized that the new AI Hub empowers users to effortlessly harness the capabilities of AI, eliminating the requirement for extensive annotation and model training.

He believes that the platform can revolutionize our interaction with information, encompassing a wide range of content types such as handwritten notes, PDFs, spreadsheets and even code.

“The opportunities are endless, from discovery, understanding to creation. As we look forward in our roadmap, we’re excited to see the same transformation happen in other modalities, including audio, video and more,” he said. “Ultimately, AI Hub will become a community where anyone can create and distribute AI-driven applications.”

He said the company is actively investing in developer tools and product partnerships to empower third-party developers to build, host and run AI apps on Instabase AI Hub.

“In the near future, third-party developers will be able to publish apps, share with the AI Hub community and monetize these apps on AI Hub,” added Bhardwaj. “This would enable users of AI Hub to discover and consume these AI apps, built by Instabase and a community of third-party developers, across various use cases.”