Machine learning data analysis startup Relevance AI lands $4 million as US VC Insight Partners thinks smaller

Relevance AI, a Sydney startup founded last year to help developers do more with unstructured data and aid data scientists experiment with vectors, has raised A$4 million in a seed round.

The round was led by US VC Insight Partners, which rarely heads into early-stage investment, with participation from Galileo Ventures and Archangel Ventures.

The startup will use the funding to expand its global customer base and double its headcount. It already has more than 3 million end users, with 100 million weekly requests across sectors such as SaaS, e-commerce, education, and gaming.

The machine learning platform helps developers work with vectors. Vectors are a specialised data type that allows for a high dimensional numerical representation of unstructured data such as text, image or audio so that it can be analysed for semantic similarities by a computer.

Co-founder Jacky Koh said most businesses rely on structured data analysis to surface insights for decision making, rather than delving into vectors.

“However, 80% of business data is unstructured that comes in forms such as text, images, audio, user interactions and other formats,” he said

“We’re thrilled to have secured this funding, as it will enable us to grow our team to continue pushing the boundaries of what’s possible and to build a highly reliable and valuable product for our customers. With this with the backing and unique perspective of the team at Insight Partners, we expect to grow rapidly over the next year.”

Insight Partners Managing Director George Mathew said that historically, only the tech giants have been able to make use of vectors in the machine learning architectures.

“Relevance AI enables companies of all sizes to leverage vector-based technology. Its strong founding team has created an advanced API powered offering which has positioned Relevance AI as the innovative, early enterprise leader,” he said.

“We look forward to partnering with Relevance AI as it continues to scaleup.”

The company has spent the past year building and scaling its platform for companies such as TFTactics, Zora.co and Overwolf.

TFTactics a gaming application, has been able to build an AI coach that takes unstructured game actions of their millions of users and performs unstructured data analysis such as identifying different cohort of playstyles and most similar players.