Startup Rohirrim Inc. today announced that it has raised $15 million to expand the adoption of its artificial intelligence-powered text generation platform.

Rohirrim received the investment, a Series A round, from Insight Partners and returning backer General Purpose Venture Capital. The cash infusion comes less than a year after the company’s launch from stealth mode. 

Enterprises issue contracts to suppliers with the help of a document called a request for proposal, or RFP, that contains a detailed overview of a given project’s parameters. Multiple suppliers respond to the RFP and the bidder with the most competitive offer nabs the contract. In some complex deals, crafting a response to an RFP can take weeks of work for the bidders.

Rohirrim claims its AI platform compresses the process into a few minutes. Users enter a high-level description of the RFP response they wish to create and the platform generates it automatically. According to the company, workers can also produce other types of longform content such as case studies. 

The platform generates text based on a company’s internal data. It can ingest Word documents, PDF files, slideshows and records information in a variety of other formats. Rohirrim can collect that data from both on-premises and cloud-based applications, as well as employee devices.

The company made its software available to customers earlier this year. Since then, Rohirrim claims to have built up an installed base that includes a “significant number” of Fortune 100 enterprises. One of those Fortune 100 customers is IBM Corp., which is using the company’s platform to automatically generate business content.

Rohirrim will use its latest funding round to grow its headcount and customer base. The company’s growth strategy places a particular emphasis on extending its platform to new markets. According to Rohirrim, its platform is already used in more than a half-dozen segments including the commercial real estate, defense and aerospace, energy, higher education, insurance and legal sectors. 

The company will also invest a portion of the new capital in product development. According to its website, Rohirrim is currently building a large language model called Anglachel 200B. The model’s name suggests it features 200 billion parameters, which would make it nearly three times larger than Meta Platforms Inc.’s Llama 2, one of the most advanced open-source AI systems on the market.

Rohirrim says Anglachel 200B is based on an AI development approach called unsupervised learning. Historically, the training datasets with which neural networks were built contained contextual cues designed to guide the learning process in the right direction. In an unsupervised learning project, the training dataset doesn’t have to be enriched with such clues, which saves time for developers.

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