Fundamental Raises $255 Million for AI Large Tabular Model

Artificial intelligence (AI) company Fundamental has teamed with Amazon and raised $255 million.

The company, which has developed a “large tabular model” (LTM) to glean predictions from enterprise data, said Thursday (Feb. 5) it will use the funding to scale compute, expand enterprise deployments, and add to its research, engineering, and go-to-market teams.

“Enterprises have historically relied on antiquated machine learning algorithms that predate deep learning to analyze their data, inform decisions, and make predictions,” the announcement from Amazon said.

“In contrast, recent advances in deep learning have largely centered on LLMs [large language models] and related architectures optimized for unstructured, sequential data such as text, images, and video.”

Thus, these models are ill-suited to capturing the “non-sequential, nonlinear relationships inherent in tabular data,” the announcement added, and struggle to “process enterprise-scale tables at all due to size and dimensionality constraints.”

This means they’re not designed to derive value from the tabular datasets that inform every crucial enterprise decision. With NEXUS, the announcement said, companies can predict with greater accuracy, replacing legacy predictive analytics with a purpose-built foundation model designed specifically for tabular data.

“Fundamental enables enterprises to move beyond analysis of past events to answer forward-looking questions like what will happen next, when risks will emerge, or where opportunities exist — all with fast time-to-value and enterprise-grade deployment on any cloud infrastructure,” Amazon added.

In addition to the funding, Fundamental has launched a collaboration with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to accelerate enterprise adoption of its model to AWS customers, who can now purchase and deploy Fundamental’s NEXUS LTM in their AWS environment.

“Fundamental’s structured data prediction model builds on AWS’ advanced AI offerings, helping enterprise customers fill a crucial gap in comprehensive tabular data analysis at scale,” said Dave Brown, VP of Compute, Platforms & ML Services at AWS.

“By partnering with Fundamental, we are making it seamless for customers to transform tabular data — the backbone of enterprise decision-making — into a powerful predictive asset. This collaboration exemplifies our commitment to bringing transformative AI solutions to market with the enterprise-grade security and scalability our customers demand.”

Writing about Amazon’s place in the AI race earlier this week, PYMNTS CEO Karen Webster argued that the challenge facing the company is not a technical one.

“The company knows how to build and scale new business units and monetize them. And they have done so well with AWS,” she argued. “But doing so required separating AWS from retail economics and allowing it to serve a broad ecosystem of companies, including competitors.”

Alexa and Rufus, the company’s voice assistant and AI shopping assistant, “have not been given that freedom,” Webster said.

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