- Business application platform company Instabase announced recently that it raised $105 million in Series B funding at a $1.05 billion valuation
Instabase — a business application platform company — announced recently that it raised $105 million in Series B funding led by Index Ventures with participation from existing investors Greylock Partners, New Enterprise Associates (NEA), and Andreessen Horowitz. And additional participating investors include Spark Capital, Tribe Capital, SC Ventures, and Glynn Capital.
Including this round of funding, Instabase has raised a total of $132 million since being founded. And now the company has a valuation of $1.05 billion.
With this round of funding, Instabase plans to accelerate recruiting and scale its core platform. In conjunction with this funding round Index Ventures partner Sarah Cannon is joining the board of directors at Instabase.
“The addressable opportunity for Instabase is staggering as the market is transitioning towards intelligent automation. I am thrilled to be working with a visionary founder like Anant and his deeply technical team,” explained Cannon.
Instabase has a goal of making computers work for people and not the other way around. This empowers people to focus on the meaningful and productive parts of their jobs. And Instabase’s platform enables businesses to build customizable apps for automating different parts of their business.
For example, a bank can quickly build an app that automatically verifies customer income in a fraction of a second by sifting through documents like camera pictures, scans of paystubs, tax documents, bank statements, and other similar documents submitted by the customer.
And the platform comes equipped with the tools for reading documents, data extraction and classification, natural language processing, and optical character recognition. Plus it is designed to enable creators, developers, and organizations to quickly develop complex personalized business applications.
Instabase has an app store and a growing marketplace of pre-packaged business apps for different industries like Income Verification, Adverse Media Analysis, Identity Verification, Trade Finance, Contract Analysis, and Financial Spreading.
“Today, on your smartphone you have an app store where you can find a dozen apps to have food delivered to your door, but we don’t have an app store where large enterprises, for example, a bank can find an app for income verification; or an insurance company can find an app for processing claims; every such application is custom-built. We should wonder — why?” said Instabase founder and CEO Anant Bhardwaj.
Instabase currently works with more than half of the top ten financial institutions in the U.S. as well as many global banks.
In November 2018, Standard Chartered Bank announced a partnership with Instabase for automating their client onboarding, credit documentation, and KYC processes. As a result, this reduced the average client onboarding time from 41 to 8 days within their Corporate & Institutional Banking business. And their Retail Banking business was able to accelerate lending to SMEs (Small and Mid-size Enterprises) with Instabase’s platform thus providing an estimated savings of 300 hours a week with much faster turnaround time and reduction in human errors.
“Our partnership with Instabase has been a success story with a tremendous amount of two-way learning,” added Alex Manson, Global Head of SC Ventures. “We share Anant and his team’s vision and partnership ethos and are excited to participate in their next phase of growth.”
Instabase was launched in 2015 by Bhardwaj while he was a Ph.D. student at MIT in the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL). In that year, Bhardwaj left the Ph.D. program and moved to the Bay Area to pursue building Instabase. While in Silicon Valley, Bhardwaj met NEA general partner Peter Sonsini — who provided the seed funding in Instabase along with Jerry Chen of Greylock Partners. And Martin Casado of Andreessen Horowitz led the Series A in June 2017.
“We first met Anant in 2015 and could instantly tell he was working on something incredible,” commented Sonsini. “We have been consistently impressed with Instabase’s progress — they are pioneering what the future of automation will be. We are thrilled to continue our partnership with the Instabase team.”
Instabase has 42 employees across offices in San Francisco, Boston, New York, and Bangalore according to Crunchbase. And in an interview with Bloomberg, Cannon said that Instabase already has several customers that are paying over $1 million per year for the product.
