Tabular data is a broad term that encompasses structured data that generally fits into a specific row and column. It can be a SQL database, a spreadsheet, a .CSV file, etc.
While there has been tremendous progress on artificial intelligence applied to unstructured and sequential data, these large language models are fuzzy by design. They are built to manipulate input tokens to generate a coherent output without necessarily following a fixed structure. The best LLMs are also either expensive to access via an API or expensive to run on your own cloud infrastructure.
And yet, many companies already have a data strategy with a data warehouse or data lake to centralize all important data and some data scientists that can leverage this data to improve the company’s strategy.
French startup Neuralk-AI is an artificial intelligence company has been working on AI models focused on tabular data. The company this week announced $4 million in funding.
“Data with real value for companies is data that was identified a long time ago, structured in the form of a table, and used by the data scientists of these companies to create all their machine learning algorithms,” Nueralk-AI co-founder and Chief Scientist Officer Alexandre Pasquiou told TechCrunch.
Neuralk-AI thinks there’s an opportunity in revisiting AI model development, but with a specific focus on structured data. At first, it plans to offer its model as an API to data scientists working for commerce companies because these companies love data — think product catalogs, customer databases, shopping cart trends, etc.
“Today, LLMs are great for search, natural user interaction, and answering questions based on unstructured documents. But it has some limitations the moment we go back to classic machine learning, which is really based on classic tabular data,” Pasquiou said.
With Neuralk-AI, retailers can automate complex data workflows with smart deduplication and enrichment. But they could also use the company’s models to detect fraud, optimize the product recommendations, and generate sales forecasts that could be used for inventory management and product pricing.
Fly Ventures led the company’s $4 million round with SteamAI also participating. Several business angels also invested in the startup, such as Thomas Wolf from Hugging Face, Charles Gorintin from Alan, and Philippe Corrot and Nagi Letaifa from Mirakl.
The team is still actively working on its models. It plans to test with a group of leading French retailers and commerce startups, such as E.Leclerc, Auchan, Mirakl, and Lucky Cart.
“Within three or four months, we’ll release the first version of our model and the public benchmark on which we’ll be able to rank our model compared to the state-of-the-art in this space,” Pasquiou said. “And in September, the idea is to be the best tabular foundation model in everything related to representation learning.”
Romain Dillet is a Senior Reporter at TechCrunch. He has written over 3,000 articles on technology and tech startups and has established himself as an influential voice on the European tech scene. He has a deep background in startups, privacy, security, fintech, blockchain, mobile, social and media. With twelve years of experience at TechCrunch, he’s one of the familiar faces of the tech publication that obsessively covers Silicon Valley and the tech industry. In fact, his career started at TechCrunch when he was 21. Based in Paris, many people in the tech ecosystem consider him as the most knowledgeable tech journalist in town. Romain likes to spot important startups before anyone else. He was the first person to cover N26, Revolut and DigitalOcean. He has written scoops on large acquisitions from Apple, Microsoft and Snap. When he’s not writing, Romain is also a developer — he understands how the tech behind the tech works. He also has a deep historical knowledge of the computer industry for the past 50 years. He knows how to connect the dots between innovations and the effect on the fabric of our society. Romain graduated from Emlyon Business School, a leading French business school specialized in entrepreneurship. He has helped several non-profit organizations, such as StartHer, an organization that promotes education and empowerment of women in technology, and Techfugees, an organization that empowers displaced people with technology.