LlamaIndex, an agent development platform for automating knowledge work over unstructured enterprise data, closed a $19 million Series A round of funding, led by Norwest Venture Partners with participation from existing investor Greylock. This funding round brings the total to $27.5 million.
The company will use this new funding to expand its team and accelerate the development of its core generative AI (GenAI) agent development platform. It will also extend its proven solutions to a waitlist of over 10,000 organizations, including 90 Fortune 500 companies eager to start using LlamaIndex.
LlamaIndex also announced the launch and general availability of LlamaCloud. This commercial knowledge management platform powers the GenAI stack with best-in-class end-to-end accuracy for agent workflows over unstructured data. Created with enterprise-grade reliability, security, and scalability and integrated with LlamaIndex’s open-source framework, LlamaCloud enables users to connect, parse, extract, and index large volumes of unstructured data, including PDFs, PowerPoints, images, charts, and more. This approach ensures that enterprise data is accurate and available for various downstream agent use cases, such as document research, automating workflows, synthesizing insights, and generating reports.
In under two years, LlamaIndex has grown to more than 3 million monthly downloads across multiple open-source packages and has over 38,000 stars on Github, 230,000 LinkedIn followers, and three courses with Andrew Ng, CEO and founder of DeepLearning.AI.
LlamaIndex was founded in 2023 with the launch of an open-source project that offered developers a starting point for building any custom agent over data, with tools that include data connectors, indices to structure data, and advanced retrieval. And the company also offers commercially available self-serve APIs that enable open-source users to get better data and output quality, including LlamaParse, helping companies transform unstructured data into a structured format that can be used for retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) applications.
In developing these tools and APIs, founders CEO Jerry Liu and CTO Simon Suo saw developers running into roadblocks related to processing and indexing their data properly as they built naive RAG chatbots. Developers were wasting development cycles and experiencing low accuracy, which cost time and resources. To address the issues of building production-ready agent applications, LlamaIndex developed its core technology for data processing, which is the foundation of the LlamaCloud knowledge management platform.
Available now, LlamaCloud can be deployed via SaaS or in a virtual private cloud and is an out-of-the-box solution for building RAG applications from data ingestion through agent deployment. It offers a library of enterprise-ready data connectors and team features for collaboratively viewing, editing, and deploying indexes. LlamaCloud also delivers enterprise-grade security, utilizing role-based access control (RBAC) and single sign-on (SSO) to gate data access across development teams and end users.
With customers including Rakuten, Carlyle, and Salesforce, LlamaIndex has become a widely used GenAI development platform that provides tools and abstractions for enabling enterprise engineers to easily connect proprietary data sources to LLMs.
KEY QUOTES:
“LlamaIndex is compelling for Norwest as we’ve been closely studying enterprise requirements for AI adoption, specifically around data preparation, ingestion and custom agents as part of an ongoing investment thesis. The founding team has demonstrated grit and resilience, building usable, enterprise-enabling capabilities to solve critical pain points—from production accuracy issues to scaling complex data workflows. With customers already lined up, LlamaIndex has the potential to empower the agentic enterprise. We’re excited to see where the next year takes them.”
– Dave Zilberman, general partner at Norwest Venture Partners
“One of the most valuable use cases for large language model (LLM) agents is automating all knowledge work over unstructured data. Because only fragmented tools around data connectors, storage and agent orchestration have been available, developers struggle finding the right techniques and achieving high accuracy for production-grade agents. We made it our mission to deliver the most secure, accurate and easy-to-use platform for building end-to-end knowledge agents, and in the process created a massive community at the epicenter of GenAI. Norwest’s and Greylock’s support in our Series A will allow us to continue growing our reach and enhancing the technology to ensure enterprises can get the most benefits from their AI agents.”
– LlamaIndex CEO Jerry Liu
“Agentforce development has been greatly accelerated with key open-source frameworks, including LlamaIndex, as we iterate our agent framework with our customers across many industries. LlamaIndex provides advanced async workflow abstractions that enable us to build scalable concurrent agents much faster than without such a flexible modern framework.”
– Phil Mui, senior vice president of Engineering for Agentforce at Salesforce
“LlamaCloud’s ability to efficiently parse and index our complex enterprise data has significantly bolstered RAG performance. Prior to LlamaCloud, multiple engineers needed to work on maintenance of data pipelines, but now our engineers can focus on the development and adoption of LLM applications.”
– Yusuke Kaji, general manager of AI for Business at Rakuten
