SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 8, 2023 — MindsDB, an artificial intelligence virtual database, today announced an investment from NVentures, NVIDIA’s venture capital arm, bringing total seed funding raised to $46.5 million.
The latest round – which includes existing investors Benchmark, Mayfield, Y Combinator, OpenOcean and Walden Catalyst – will be used to advance MindsDB’s mission, making AI more accessible to all businesses by enabling the world’s 30 million software developers to implement AI capabilities in their products.
“Today, there are close to 30 million software developers around the world, but only less than five percent are proficient AI/ML engineers,” said Jorge Torres, Co-Founder and CEO of MindsDB. “However, the world is facing a new transformation where most software that you know today will need to be upgraded with an AI-centric approach. To accomplish this, every developer worldwide, regardless of their AI knowledge, should be capable of producing, managing and plugging AI models to existing software infrastructure. This is the exact issue that our AI database resolves.”
“Businesses everywhere see the extraordinary potential generative AI can have for their operations, but there’s an acute shortage of specialized talent to help bring this capability within their reach,” said Mohamed (Sid) Siddeek, Corporate Vice President and Head of NVentures. “MindsDB is helping to change that, increasing the accessibility of AI for companies of all sizes.”
“We were immediately impressed with MindsDB’s success in open source, the broad reach of its platform for building AI into applications, and its extensive partnerships across the database and AI ecosystems,” said Navin Chaddha, Managing Partner at Mayfield. “The team has built a uniquely innovative platform to increase AI accessibility within organizations and we see a clear opportunity to help scale an organization leading the way in empowering business to seamlessly create and deploy generative AI apps.”
MindsDB has more than 130 integrations and enables developers to manage AI models from the most advanced ML frameworks including Hugging Face, Cohere, LangChain, Nixtla, and to plug them to data in platforms like Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB and Snowflake.
On top of more than 150,000 open source deployments, MindsDB Pro Cloud is used by more than 100 emerging startups and small-to-medium sized businesses, helping companies like Bytes, Dumuso, JourneyFoods, Progressify, Precise Finance, Rize and more, to improve their products and internal operations.
“Institutional investors use Precise Finance’s B2B embedded finance platform to evaluate smaller companies with the help of AI. Since using MindsDB, we have removed the need for data engineers and data scientists, putting AI development skills directly in the hands of our domain experts,” said Dan Shapir, Co-founder and CTO of Precise Finance. “As a result, we not only improved both accuracy and ease of use for our domain experts, but we greatly reduced the time it takes for our customers to evaluate potential investments, allowing for a streamlined onboarding process that maintains stringent underwriting standards for the financial sector.”
“With MindsDB, we have used our existing team and technical resources to implement advanced Machine Learning models faster and with less complexity,” said Sameer Nayyar, EVP of product and operations at Domuso, a next-generation financial services platform offering comprehensive payment processing solutions for multifamily properties. “It has positively impacted our business, and we saw a reduction of chargebacks by $95k over two months and a saving of $500,000 over the year.”
The company is also recognized as one of the most promising AI companies from Forbes and by Gartner as a Cool Vendor for Data and AI (2022).
