• The seed round is led by venture capital firm RTP Global and supported by Lunar Ventures and Hive Ventures
• Angel investors include Charles Songhurst, Demetrios Kellari, and Mehdi Ghissassi
• The company is expanding its hiring efforts and aims to double its headcount by the end of 2023

London, UK. 08.00 AM GMT 1st February 2023 – Instill AI, a startup providing tools to derive insights or generate meaningful content from unstructured data (image, video, audio, text), has raised $3.6M in a seed round, led by venture capital firm RTP Global. The funding will help the startup build on its mission to help organizations extract untapped value from unstructured data, by making AI more accessible to companies of all sizes. 

This round is also supported by Lunar Ventures; returning investor Hive Ventures; Charles Songhurst, former corporate strategy executive and M&A execute at Microsoft; Demetrios Kellari, Head of Systems and Technology Integration at Cavnue; and Mehdi Ghissassi, Director of Product for Google’s AI/ML Research org. In its pre-seed round, Instill AI was also supported by Cornerstone Ventures.

While deep learning has shown its strength in understanding unstructured data in recent years, data tooling has not yet caught up. Despite the emergence of new tools, the implementation and deployment of an effective AI solution in an organization’s data stack is still extremely costly and complex. Building in-house AI solutions requires huge investment and relies on multifunctional teams. As a result, only large enterprises with abundant resources can successfully build exclusive functionalities and components to process their unstructured data and then, distill business insights or deliver AI applications.

The other problem is that while emerging MLOps tools and AI services make tapping the value of unstructured data possible, they provide different proprietary frameworks. This causes difficulties for AI practitioners as they piece them together to build a custom end-to-end solution and integrate with the existing stack. The result? Team silos and inefficiencies.

To solve this problem, Instill AI has introduced its open-source project — Versatile Data Pipeline (VDP) for unstructured data ETL (Extract, Transform and Load), that seamlessly brings AI into the modern data stack. The company provides modern Data and AI teams with no-/low-code tools to streamline the process of distilling the value of unstructured data, converting unstructured data into meaningful data representations. By integrating Instill AI’s solution into their data stack, Data and AI teams can glean richer insights, uncover unknown patterns, develop AI applications faster, and work more efficiently — free from siloes. The community is impressed; in just five months, VDP has gained 600 stars on GitHub since its launch.

The investment will enable Instill AI to launch, later this year, a fully managed cloud service of VDP, to remove the stress of infrastructure maintenance for community members. To accomplish this, Instill AI is expanding its hiring efforts and aims to double its headcount by the end of 2023. 

Ping-Lin Chang, CEO and Co-founder of Instill AI, said:

“Unstructured data can be more analyzable, if AI is more accessible. At Instill AI we are committed to making this happen. We believe that machine learning and AI should be as easy to access as other off-the-shelf cloud services in the software industry today. This seed investment helps us speed up the development and strengthen the readiness of the VDP, bringing us one step closer to making the solution to this problem a reality.”

Gareth Jefferies, partner at RTP Global, commented:

“Having first-hand experience of the pain that comes with deploying AI services, Ping-Lin and his co-founder Xiaofei found a way to help companies of all sizes overcome that pain and seamlessly bring AI into the modern data stack to unlock the value of unstructured data. We were really impressed by the approach the team at Instill AI are taking and can’t wait to see what they achieve in the next part of their journey.” 

Yan Lee, founder and managing partner at Hive Ventures, added:

“It has been a pleasure to work with Ping-Lin and Xiaofei to unleash the insights within the 80% enterprise data that is unstructured. We look forward to working closely with new investors RTP Global and Lunar VC to grow Instill AI’s value to the community.” 

You can have early access to Instill Cloud here.

Here are the open roles Instill AI is hiring for.

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Notes to Editors

Press kit available here.

Founders Bios

Ping-Lin Chang, Co-founder & CEO at Instill AI

Ping-Lin holds a PhD in Robotic Vision from Imperial College London (2014) with a research focus on Visual Simultaneous Localisation and Mapping (VSLAM) and Machine Learning (ML) for Augmented Reality (AR) in image-guided surgery. His work resulted in papers in top-tier conference/journal papers including MICCAI, TMI, RAL, and MRR. In 2015, he co-founded Umbo Computer Vision and held a CTO position to develop the company’s technical moat and lead the AI, backend, front-end, and DevOps teams to build AI-first products for autonomous video security. The products have been sold in the US, EU and Asia to help business owners significantly reduce their human operation costs and improve the business scalability. In 2020, Ping-Lin co-founded Instill AI with Xiaofei Du to build the infrastructure for unstructured data ETL to make AI more accessible to all industry sectors.

Xiaofei Du, Co-founder & COO at Instill AI

Xiaofei holds a PhD in Medical Physics from University College London (2018) with a research focus on Surgical Vision and Medical Image Analysis with Machine Learning. Her work resulted in papers in top-tier conference/journal papers including MICCAI, TMI, MedIA and ICRA. After her PhD, she worked at Umbo Computer Vision for 2+ years as an AI Researcher, focusing on developing Deep Learning algorithms for video security products. Being passionate about solving real-world problems, she developed and maintained AI models in close collaboration with customers and tailored Umbo’s AI solutions according to their feedback. Her work at Umbo contributed to publications in top Computer Vision conferences including CVPRW, ECCV, AAAI and ICCV. In 2020, Xiaofei co-founded Instill AI with Ping-Lin Chang to apply her extensive knowledge, skills and experience to solve unstructured data ETL.

Additional quotes

“Instill AIl greatly frees up MLOps engineering efforts and allows us to obtain insights from unstructured data with the same flexibility as structured data. There are very few open-source projects that target this segment of the stack with such an all-encompassing solution. This kind of versatile data pipeline can be really helpful to those teams with limited time/resources.” — Member of the Instill AI community

About Instill AI

Instill AI provides no-/low-code tools to convert unstructured data to meaningful data representations. Users can integrate our service into their data stack, and start tapping into the wealth of their unstructured data and benefit from AI in a snap. See Instill AI in action here.

Founded in 2020, the company is a small, ambitious team of passionate engineers/researchers sharing an unconventional culture fused by DevOps, MLOps and academic research lab. We are hands-on and love to automate everything. 

About RTP Global

RTP Global is a leading venture capital firm focused on investing in early-stage technology companies. Since 2000, RTP Global has partnered with over a hundred founding teams across Europe, Asia, and North America, and has grown AUM to more than $2bn.

RTP has backed over a dozen companies that have gone on to be worth over $1bn – half of which are now public, and trade at +$10bn market caps. Notable early-stage investments for the firm include Datadog, Delivery Hero, SumUp, Socure and Cred.