Oct 13, 2023

Deasie, a data governance platform that supports the adoption of language model applications, announced that it has secured $2.9M in seed funding in a round involving Y Combinator that backed Curacel and Tranch , General Catalyst, RTP Global, Rebel Fund, and J12 Ventures. The funds will be used to hire senior engineers as Deasie plans to expand its product team over the coming months. Currently, the San Francisco-headquartered company has signed a pilot agreement with a multi-billion dollar organisation and has built a strong pipeline of over 30 enterprise clients, which includes no less than five Fortune 500 companies. Adoption of Gen AI made seamless Deasie was founded earlier this year by Reece Griffiths, Mikko Peiponen, and Leo Platzer, European ex-McKinsey, QuantumBlack, Amazon & MIT executives. They founded this company after realising that most companies severely lacked the data infrastructure to adopt Generative AI in a safe and reliable manner. While other companies provide governance of structured data, use-case specific and safety-focused tools, Deasie focuses on quality and relevance assessment of unstructured data. Deasie’s platform connects to a company’s data sources, chunks all data such as documents, reports or Slack messages, into smaller sections based on semantic meaning, and tags the contents and sensitivity of each piece of data. It lets users easily spin up a GenAI application, like a chatbot, and, using the library of tags or metadata. It ensures the data being used by the language model is first filtered for relevance, quality and safety. “Nearly 80% of today’s data is unstructured – think documents, reports, text, images. With the rise of GenAI, companies are now attempting to leverage these to feed into chatbots, knowledge assistants, content-generation tools etc. However, the historic lack of quality controls and governance around this type of data means that AI applications are being fed with low quality and sensitive data, leading to the deployment of unreliable and unsafe models. We want to change that by allowing companies to intelligently vet the data they are feeding into these AI models,” said Reece Griffiths, Co-founder, and CEO of Deasie. “LLMs are reshaping the way many companies work, but many large enterprises have not yet fully embraced that opportunity because they want to ensure that the data used within them is entirely under their control. The founding team behind Deasie have the needed deep domain expertise in this area to help enterprises take full advantage of LLMs. I look forward to becoming more involved with them as they scale”, commented Nicolas Dessaigne, Partner at Y Combinator.