Instabase

History

Instabase was founded by Anant Bhardwaj in 2015, when he was a PhD student at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. At MIT, he met several influential mentors who encouraged him to pursue different research projects — one of these projects eventually became Instabase. In July 2015, he dropped out of the PhD program, and moved to San Francisco to raise capital. Greylock Partners and New Enterprise Associates were the first investors in the company.

In 2017, then a 4-person company, Instabase largely remained in the stealth mode when Martin Casado from Andreessen Horowitz led the Series A. At that time, CNBC reported that Instabase is building a "social network for data".

In 2019, for the first time Instabase officially disclosed its product offerings and customers in an interview with Bloomberg TV. Bhardwaj in the interview provided details on how the software platform powered by Artificial Intelligence is helping financial services enterprises such as large banks and insurance companies build customizable workflows for automating their critical business processes such as Invoice Processing, Lending, Know your customer (KYC), and Client Onboarding.

Pivot to deep learning and transformers

In 2020, Instabase heavily invested in transformer-based layout-aware language models and creating pre-trained base foundation models which its customers could fine-tune according to their specific requirements in-house. In 2021, Instabase disclosed that its AI platform has fully migrated to using transformer based deep learning architecture under the hood, and announced the launch of several pre-trained base foundation models included as part of the platform, which could be used for understanding any content as part of building workflows for automating business processes.