Vectara, a start-up based in Palo Alto, California, closed a $25 million Series A round for its Generative AI product platform aimed at advancing the state of Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) as a Service for regulated industries.
The new funding was led by FPV Ventures and Race Capital. Additional investors include Alumni Ventures, WVV Capital, Samsung Next, Fusion Fund, Green Sands Equity, and Mack Ventures. This funding round, combined with last year’s $28.5 million seed funding round, brings the total funding to $53.5 million.
In addition, Vectara introduced Mockingbird, a fine-tuned generative Large Language Model (LLM) designed for Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) applications. Mockingbird aims to reduce hallucinations and improve structured output, offering reliable performance with low latency and cost efficiency. It is particularly beneficial for regulated industries such as health, legal, finance, and manufacturing, where accuracy, security, and explainability are crucial. Mockingbird, combined with Vectara’s Hughes Hallucination Evaluation Model (HHEM), excels in producing structured outputs, essential for AI integration with downstream systems and autonomous agents. Sunir Shah, Founder of HuckAI, praised Mockingbird for providing clearer, more direct responses, enhancing user productivity. Mockingbird surpasses GPT-4 by 26% in Bert-F1 for RAG output quality and sets a new benchmark in operational excellence, integrating seamlessly within Vectara’s ecosystem without third-party dependencies.
“The recent $25 million Series A funding will enable us to further innovate and expand our offerings, ensuring we continue to lead the way in trusted generative AI technology,” said Amr Awadallah, Co-Founder and CEO of Vectara. “With Mockingbird, we’re not just pushing the boundaries of AI trustworthiness; we’re empowering regulated industries to leverage reliable AI solutions with confidence, paving the way for a future where AI can be a dependable partner in mission-critical tasks.”
About the Founders of Vectara
• Dr. Amr Awadallah - Co-Founder & CEO: Before co-founding Vectara, Amr was the VP of Developer Relations for Google Cloud. He co-founded Cloudera, where he developed enterprise tools for big data. Previously, he was VP of Product Intelligence Engineering at Yahoo, which acquired his first startup, Aptiva, a search engine company. Amr holds a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University and a MA from Cairo University.
• Amin Ahmad - Co-Founder & CTO: Amin spent a decade as a senior engineer at Google Research, where he led the development of question-answering and neural information retrieval systems. With 20 years of search industry experience, he has worked with Fortune 500 companies, startups, and government entities. Amin holds a BS in Computer Science and Mathematics from Bowling Green State University.
• Dr. Tallat Shafaat - Co-Founder & Chief Architect: Tallat was a Senior Software Engineer for Google Search and Google Ads before founding Vectara. As part of the Google Knowledge Graph indexing team, he designed systems that processed petabytes of data and handled up to 200,000 queries per second. Tallat holds a PhD in Distributed Systems from KTH Sweden.
