Seek AI Inc., the developer of an artificial intelligence platform that automates the generation and maintenance of code for answering ad hoc questions about data, today announced that it secured $7.5 million in pre-seed and seed funding.

Conviction Partners, a new fund from venture capitalist Sarah Guo, and Battery Ventures co-led the funding round. Other investors also participating in the round included NJP Ventures; Tristan Handy, founder of cloud data transformation tool dbt Labs; Mustafa Suleyman, co-founder of the AI company DeepMind; and Bob Muglia, former CEO of Snowflake.

Seek AI provides a cloud-based AI platform that allows business users to ask on-the-spot, or “ad hoc,” questions about data and uses AI to write new code queries to answer those questions. The platform uses generative AI like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion and GPT-3 to automate this process and provides natural language processing to understand written text.

As a result, business users and data scientists can simply type out questions about large data sets that a company has and the platform automates the creation of the code needed to query them to provide the necessary information. It works with a number of interfaces such as email, Slack, text and a range of different customer relationship management systems as well.

For example, a business user could ask, “Which products had the most profits last month?” or “What products tended to sell together in the past year?” The platform can quickly provide code that would answer these queries rapidly without needing to take as much time away from projects that the data science team is currently working on to answer spontaneous questions.

That’s because data access is already challenging for business users who are not familiar with coding and they must go to the data professionals to get help. A single one of these questions, especially the more complex the question, can add hours of work. With Seek AI, the generative AI system can use its natural language processing model and go through the database and produce highly accurate code that can then be used to cut down that development time.

“Our vision, since day one, has been to automate mundane but critical processes and workflows so that data stakeholders can get the data they need fast, and data teams can focus more on strategic efforts,” said Seek AI founder and Chief Executive Sarah Nagy.

This funding comes at a time when generative AI has begun to capture the hearts and minds of investors and the tech community at large. Stability AI Ltd., the startup behind Stable Diffusion, the neural network that can generate surreal images from text prompts, raised $101 million in October, and Microsoft Corp. may invest $10 billion in OpenAI LLC, the AI research group that developed the technology behind the GPT-3 natural language model that is the basis for the ChatGPT chatbot.

Seek AI launched its cloud-based software-as-a-service solution in October and currently has more than a dozen pilots with tech, fintech and consumer brands that range from startups to Fortune 100 companies.

By using generative AI technology, Seek AI’s technology is also capable of adapting to the data environment of the customer using deep learning and adjusting itself according to the team’s usage patterns. That means that every time a company uses Seek AI, they are building up an AI model customized to their environment and their team.

“Over time, these semantic models will become the point of reference that defines how a business operates,” said Muglia. “Because every organization is different, Seek applies deep learning to help companies develop and describe their unique semantic model.”

Nagy said that the new funding will go towards accelerating product development and making data available to everyone in organizations through the use of natural language processing and automating data queries using generative AI.

“As Seek continues to grow, it is crucial to have growth partners who understand the complexities of automation and data accessibility and share the same vision for applied AI,” said Nagy. “This funding will help us improve upon our product and reach more businesses in an array of expanding industries.”

Photo: Pixabay