illumex, a Generative Semantic Fabric platform for structured enterprise data, announced that it has raised $13 million in seed funding. The round was led by Cardumen Capital, Amdocs Ventures, and Samsung Ventures, with participation from ICI Fund, Jibe Ventures, Iron Nation Fund, Ginossar Ventures, ICON Fund, Today Ventures, and several angel investors.
illumex enables organizations to overcome data challenges that hinder generative AI (GenAI) initiatives by automating the creation of a semantic layer that unifies data silos and adds business context, and generates a consistent vocabulary of domain-specific terminology. The company already has large enterprises, like Teva and Carson, utilizing illumex for data AI readiness and has forged partnerships with Microsoft, Google Cloud, and AWS.
GenAI now drives significant business value, with some organizations reporting a contribution of upwards of 10% to bottom lines. However, concerns about GenAI’s inaccuracy and risks have only grown, and nearly a quarter of organizations have already experienced negative consequences. Existing solutions like retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) enhance accuracy by providing enterprise data for AI models.
RAG has drawbacks, especially with structured data as it demands continuous manual maintenance and does not ensure a single source of truth or accurate LLM responses. Unstructured data like text documents, is semantically meaningful, but structured data lacks inherent context, needing manual labeling that often results in ambiguity and inconsistencies across enterprise data sources. This disorganized data, with issues like duplicate records and conflicting terminology, reduces trust in GenAI applications.
illumex solves this issue by using Gen AI to automatically discover, map, and add semantic meaning to structured enterprise data. And the platform analyzes metadata without accessing the underlying sensitive information to create a unified semantic knowledge graph. This graph acts as a single source of truth that aligns all data with consistent business terminology and context.
By constructing a domain-specific ontology, which formally defines the entities, properties, and relationships that represent an organization’s knowledge structure, illumex enables consistent, contextually relevant data interactions across the enterprise. And This serves as a foundation that enables LLMs to reliably map user questions to the relevant data points that should be retrieved in order to deliver accurate results while ensuring proper governance.
KEY QUOTES:
“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.”
- Inna Tokarev Sela, Founder and CEO of illumex
“For enterprises in complex and regulated industries, adopting generative AI isn’t just a nice-to-have, it’s an existential imperative. However, they face the unique challenge of needing to balance AI-powered innovation with strict data governance and security requirements. illumex perfectly bridges this gap, enabling enterprises to maximize the GenAI opportunity while ensuring the integrity, lineage, and trustworthiness of the data fueling these applications. illumex plays a crucial role in both reassuring organizational data AI-readiness and enabling contextual and governed GenAI interactions.”
- Gonzalo Martínez de Azagra, Founder and General Partner at Cardumen Capital
