BERLIN--(BUSINESS WIRE)--deepset, the company behind the popular Haystack open source framework for building NLP services, today announced a $14 million Series A investment round led by GV. The company also introduced deepset Cloud, an enterprise SaaS platform for building language aware software. Providing developers with the tools needed to rapidly build production-ready NLP applications, deepset has attracted Global 500 enterprise customers like Airbus and has thousands of organizations using its free tooling to-date. Harpoon Ventures, System.One, Lunar Ventures and Acequia Capital also participated in the Series A round, alongside founders of leading ML and Open Source companies, including Snorkel AI, Cockroach Labs, Cloudera, Deepmind and Neo4j.
“Natural Language Processing is coming of age, and is increasingly used for a wide range of use cases, including enterprise search. It remains, however, a somewhat esoteric discipline,” said James Governor, co-founder of RedMonk. “The open source Haystack project is designed with practical adoption in mind, and aimed at enterprise developers so they can build high-quality NLP applications fast.”
The core of modern enterprise data processing
deepset builds a necessary layer for language awareness within the enterprise tech stack, enabling users to access and interact with data through language. deepset’s flagship product, Haystack, is an open source NLP framework that leverages transformer models. It enables developers to build a wide range of applications, including production-ready question answering (QA), semantic document search, and summarization. Haystack integrates with leading technologies, including Hugging Face Transformers, Elasticsearch and Pinecone, and has thousands of organizations using it with more than 100 contributors since its first release less than 24 months ago.
“There is high demand for NLP powered software. Enterprises are looking for full-stack NLP services and frameworks that allow them to build rapidly, reliably, and integrate with existing business applications,” said Milos Rusic, co-founder and CEO of deepset. “At deepset, we’re building the missing piece between data and software applications — allowing end users to access, write and even create data just with the power of language. deepset is helping machines understand language better, and we’re doing this for each and every software tool.”
Announced today, deepset is also introducing deepset Cloud, an enterprise SaaS platform that supports developers across the whole product lifecycle. deepset Cloud tailors and manages Haystack in production. Starting with experimentation, to labeling and monitoring the NLP-services through the development lifecycle, deepset Cloud makes the move from prototyping to production seamless. It is built to support large-scale business applications with many end-users, and supports collaboration within developer teams. It is therefore a platform to serve the full lifecycle, tailored to those use cases that are powered by NLP technology.
“deepset is making unprecedented advances in the field of language AI. It’s inspiring to see how many powerful use cases have already been built with Haystack and we are impressed with the team’s dedication to the open source community,” said Vidu Shanmugarajah, Partner at GV. “The launch of deepset Cloud makes modern NLP easily accessible, practical and scalable. We’re thrilled to support Milos Rusic, Malte Pietsch and Timo Möller, and the deepset team as they bring cutting-edge NLP to the market.”
“At AWS, we admire founders who think long-term and build solutions to hard problems. We were excited to see deepset’s work and understand their vision of building an enterprise-ready, open source NLP solution when we first met Milos, Malte, and Timo in 2019,” said Katie Drucker, Director and Global Leader of Business Development for Startups, Amazon Web Services (AWS). “This funding announcement is a testament to their ability to execute on that vision, and we look forward to helping them accelerate their technology and speed-to-market in the years ahead.”
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About deepset
Founded in 2018 by Milos Rusic, Malte Pietsch and Timo Möller, deepset is the company behind the popular Haystack open source framework for building NLP services. The company is bringing cutting-edge NLP to the industry via open source. deepset is backed by leading investors including GV, System.One, Harpoon Ventures, Acequia Capital, as well as supported by business angels like Spencer Kimball, Alex Ratner, Emil Eifrem, Jeff Hammerbacher. For more information on deepset, visit www.deepset.ai.
