The significant funding injection, primarily from the $225 million Series A round, was led by prominent investors including Oak HC/FT, Valor Equity Partners, Battery Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures. Hetz Ventures also participated, alongside angel investments from notable tech leaders such as Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, Brex co-founder Henrique Dubugras, and Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel.
Introducing Nexus: A New Paradigm for Structured Data
Fundamental’s CEO, Jeremy Fraenkel, highlighted the limitations of existing AI solutions.
"While LLMs have been great at working with unstructured data, like text, audio, video, and code, they don’t work well with structured data like tables," Fraenkel told TechCrunch. "With our model Nexus, we have built the best foundation model to handle that type of data."
Dubbed a **Large Tabular Model (LTM)** rather than an LLM, Nexus represents a significant departure from contemporary AI practices. Unlike many modern AI models, Nexus is deterministic, meaning it consistently provides the same answer to a given question. Crucially, it also foregoes the transformer architecture that underpins models from most current AI labs. Fundamental classifies Nexus as a foundation model due to its pre-training and fine-tuning processes, yet its output and capabilities are distinctly different from what clients might expect from partners like OpenAI or Anthropic.
Addressing the Challenges of Big Data Analysis
These distinctions are vital because Fundamental is targeting a critical use-case where current AI models often falter. Transformer-based AI models are typically constrained by their context windows, making it challenging for them to reason over extremely large datasets—such as spreadsheets containing billions of rows. However, such enormous structured datasets are commonplace within large enterprises, presenting a substantial opportunity for models capable of operating at this scale.
Fraenkel sees this as a massive opportunity for Fundamental. By leveraging Nexus, the company can introduce advanced techniques to **Big Data analysis**, offering a solution that is both more powerful and flexible than currently available algorithms.
"You can now have one model across all of your use cases, so you can now expand massively the number of use cases that you tackle," Fraenkel explained. "And on each one of those use cases, you get better performance than what you would otherwise be able to do with an army of data scientists."
Early Success and Strategic Partnerships
This promising technology has already garnered significant attention, leading to several high-profile contracts, including seven-figure agreements with Fortune 100 clients. Furthermore, Fundamental has forged a strategic partnership with AWS, enabling AWS users to deploy Nexus directly from their existing instances, further expanding its reach and accessibility.
