In a significant step towards enhancing trust and governance in enterprise AI, Illumex has announced raising $13M in seed funding. This round, led by Cardumen Capital, Amdocs Ventures, and Samsung Ventures, with additional backing from ICI Fund, Jibe Ventures, Iron Nation Fund, Ginnosar Ventures, ICON Fund, Today Ventures, and several prominent angel investors, will empower Illumex to tackle fundamental data challenges that hinder generative AI (GenAI) initiatives.
Illumex, headquartered in New York, specializes in Generative Semantic Fabric for structured enterprise data. Their innovative platform serves as an intermediate layer, reconciling data silos and adding context and meaning to data, thereby enabling reliable and transparent AI initiatives. The company’s cutting-edge technology automates the creation of a semantic layer that unifies data silos and generates a consistent vocabulary of domain-specific terminology.
Tackling Data Challenges
With the rapid adoption of GenAI, two-thirds of organizations are now utilizing this technology, as per a recent McKinsey survey. While GenAI is significantly contributing to business value, some organizations have reported it accounting for up to 10% of their bottom lines. However, concerns about the accuracy and risks associated with GenAI are growing, with nearly a quarter of organizations experiencing negative consequences.
Existing solutions like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhance accuracy by providing enterprise data for AI models. However, RAG faces challenges, especially with structured data, requiring continuous manual maintenance and failing to ensure a single source of truth or accurate responses from large language models (LLMs). Unstructured data, like text documents, naturally has semantic meaning, but structured data lacks this context, leading to ambiguities and inconsistencies across enterprise data sources.
Illumex’s Innovative Solution
Illumex addresses these challenges by using generative AI to automatically discover, map, and add semantic meaning to structured enterprise data. Their platform analyzes metadata—without accessing sensitive information—to create a unified semantic knowledge graph. This graph acts as a single source of truth, aligning all data with consistent business terminology and context.
By automatically constructing a domain-specific ontology, which formally defines the entities, properties, and relationships representing an organization’s knowledge structure, Illumex enables consistent, contextually relevant data interactions across the enterprise. This foundation allows LLMs to reliably map user questions to relevant data points, delivering accurate results while ensuring proper governance.
Trusted by Leading Enterprises
Illumex’s platform is already in use by major enterprises like Teva and Carson, helping them achieve data AI readiness. Additionally, Illumex has forged partnerships with industry giants such as Microsoft, Google Cloud, and AWS.
Inna Tokarev Sela, Founder and CEO of Illumex, emphasizes the importance of solving fundamental data challenges for enterprise AI success. “The key to enterprise generative AI success lies in solving the fundamental data challenges that have caused so many projects to fail. Our Generative Semantic Fabric aligns organizational data with business meaning and domain-specific context, allowing organizations to finally trust the results of their AI initiatives. By enabling business users to interact reliably with data using natural language, without teaching them the precise technical definitions, we’re democratizing AI and empowering enterprises to make better decisions.”
Empowering Decision Intelligence
Illumex’s Generative Semantic Fabric streamlines the complex process of mapping data semantics and resolving terminological inconsistencies across business silos. This is crucial for achieving AI and GenAI readiness. By enabling transparent and governed data interactions with LLMs, Illumex opens up transformative enterprise use cases for generative AI. Their domain-specific generative AI engine offers a hallucinations free, ChatGPT-like experience that business users can fully trust, making organizational LLM prompting smooth, governed, and customized.
Transformative Enterprise Use Cases
The platform automates the creation of a unified business data language, significantly reducing the time needed to find and utilize data effectively. It recommends optimal data usage, enables live collaboration, and brings trust to every analytics iteration. Illumex also provides suggestive data and analytics utilization monitoring, notifying users of duplication efforts, conflicts, and data misuse through live alerting and recommendations. This helps address issues like data chaos and effort duplication, which damage the reliability of analytics.
Additionally, Illumex automates knowledge documentation, ensuring every analytics effort is documented, certified, and trackable. This addresses the problem of “tribal knowledge” within data teams, where valuable information often leaves with departing employees.
A Vision for the Future
Illumex envisions a world where generative AI allows organizations to unlock the full potential of big data for decision intelligence. By contextualizing organizational knowledge, Illumex helps achieve data democratization with trust and efficient ROI. Their platform supports enterprises in activating their data culture and digital transformation initiatives, making the data practice instantly smarter.
Illumex‘s success in securing $13M in seed funding is a testament to the growing need for robust, reliable AI solutions in the enterprise space. With their innovative Generative Semantic Fabric, Illumex is poised to revolutionize how organizations interact with and leverage their data, ensuring that AI initiatives are trustworthy, governed, and ultimately successful.
