illumex announces $13M funding to enable trustworthy and governed enterprise GenAI with structured data

The platform acts as an intermediate layer that reconciles data silos and automatically adds context and meaning to data, enabling reliable and transparent AI initiatives

NEW YORK, June 27, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- illumex, the Generative Semantic Fabric platform for structured enterprise data, announced today that it has raised $13M in seed funding. The round was led by Cardumen Capital, Amdocs Ventures, and Samsung Ventures, with participation from ICI Fund, Jibe Ventures, Iron Nation Fund, Ginossar Ventures, ICON Fund, Today Ventures, and renowned angel investors. illumex empowers organizations to overcome data challenges that hinder generative AI (GenAI) initiatives by automating the creation of a semantic layer that unifies data silos and adds business context, as well as generating a consistent vocabulary of domain-specific terminology. The company already has large enterprises, like Teva and Carson, leveraging illumex for their data AI readiness and has forged partnerships with Microsoft, Google Cloud, and AWS.

Adoption of generative AI has surged over the past year, with two-thirds of organizations now using the technology, according to a recent McKinsey survey. Importantly, GenAI is now driving significant business value, with some organizations reporting a contribution of upwards of 10% to bottom lines. However, concerns about the inaccuracy and the risks of GenAI have only grown, and nearly a quarter of organizations say they've already experienced negative consequences. Existing solutions like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhance accuracy by providing enterprise data for AI models. However, RAG has drawbacks, especially with structured data: it demands continuous manual maintenance and doesn't ensure a single source of truth or accurate LLM responses. Unstructured data, such as text documents, is semantically meaningful, but structured data lacks inherent context, needing manual labeling that often results in ambiguity and inconsistencies across enterprise data sources. This disorganized data, with issues like duplicate records and conflicting terminology, erodes trust in GenAI applications.

illumex solves this by using generative AI to automatically discover, map, and add semantic meaning to structured enterprise data. The platform analyzes metadata — without accessing the underlying sensitive information — to create a unified semantic knowledge graph. This graph acts as a single source of truth that aligns all data with consistent business terminology and context. By automatically constructing a domain-specific ontology, which formally defines the entities, properties, and relationships that represent an organization's knowledge structure, illumex enables consistent, contextually relevant data interactions across the enterprise. This serves as a foundation that enables LLMs to reliably map user questions to the relevant data points that should be retrieved in order to deliver accurate results while ensuring proper governance.

"The key to enterprise generative AI success lies in solving the fundamental data challenges that have caused so many projects to fail," said Inna Tokarev Sela, Founder and CEO of illumex. "Our Generative Semantic Fabric aligns organizational data with business meaning and domain-specific context, allowing organizations to finally trust the results of their AI initiatives. By enabling business users to interact reliably with data using natural language, without teaching them the precise technical definitions, we're democratizing AI and empowering enterprises to make better decisions."

"For enterprises in complex and regulated industries, adopting generative AI isn't just a nice-to-have, it's an existential imperative," said Gonzalo Martínez de Azagra, Founder and General Partner at Cardumen Capital. "However, they face the unique challenge of needing to balance AI-powered innovation with strict data governance and security requirements. illumex perfectly bridges this gap, enabling enterprises to maximize the GenAI opportunity while ensuring the integrity, lineage, and trustworthiness of the data fueling these applications. illumex plays a crucial role in both reassuring organizational data AI-readiness and enabling contextual and governed GenAI interactions."

About illumex 

illumex empowers organizations to unlock the full value of their enterprise data through its Generative Semantic Fabric. The company's turnkey platform automates the complex process of mapping data semantics and resolving terminological inconsistencies across business silos - a critical step for achieving AI and GenAI readiness. By enabling transparent and governed data interactions with LLMs, illumex opens up transformative enterprise use cases for generative AI. The company was founded by Inna Tokarev Sela, former AVP & Head of AI at Sisense and Senior Director of Machine Learning at SAP, who brings two decades of experience leading large-scale initiatives to leverage data for AI. illumex is an alumni of the Intel Ignite and ICON programs.

Gavriel Cohen
Concrete Media for illumex
[email protected]

SOURCE illumex