MindsDB raises funding from Nvidia to democratize AI application development

MindsDB, a database platform facilitating AI-centric applications, today announced the successful conclusion of a $5 million investment round led by NVentures, an arm of Nvidia, with participation from additional investors. This new funding propels MindsDB’s cumulative seed funding to $46.5 million, fortifying the company’s objective of democratizing access to artificial intelligence (AI) for global enterprises.

MindsDB stated that this capital infusion will expedite the company’s mission to integrate AI capabilities into products aimed at the expansive cohort of approximately 30 million software developers spanning diverse industries.

The company has highlighted its platform’s array of over 130 AI integrations, allowing developers to oversee AI models originating from diverse advanced machine learning frameworks like OpenAI, Anthropic, Hugging Face, Langchain and Nixtla. 

By facilitating a fusion of these models with data residing within platforms such as Amazon Redshift, Google BigQuery, MySQL, Postgres, MongoDB and Snowflake, the platform assumes a pivotal role in enabling cohesive AI incorporation.

“This new backing from Nvidia signals that the AI revolution will not be limited to companies with fully staffed data science teams and expertise. Every developer worldwide, regardless of their AI knowledge, should be capable of producing, managing and plugging AI models into existing software infrastructure,” Jorge Torres, CEO and cofounder of MindsDB, told VentureBeat. “Our goal is to help solve, enable and inspire the world’s 30 million-plus developers to leverage their data to build AI applications, no matter their data source or [the] machine learning model/framework they want to use.”

Torres claims that AI proficiency is a rarity among current software developers, with fewer than 1% possessing this skill. Most of these few proficient individuals are nestled within the ranks of the largest market leaders. This scarcity, he asserts, erects barriers that hinder burgeoning startups as well as small and medium-sized enterprises from harnessing the advantages of generative AI.

In response to these challenges, Torres elucidated that MindsDB’s mission revolves around democratizing AI development, rendering the journey from prototype to production accessible to all stripes of developers without requiring specialized AI training. 

The platform aims to empower developers to fashion AI applications directly from existing corporate data reservoirs, erasing the barriers to entry and fostering the adoption of an AI-centric paradigm across companies of varying dimensions. 

“Our mission to increase AI accessibility within organizations will only grow in importance as AI fundamentally changes the world,” Torres told VentureBeat. “The new funding will enable us to evolve our product to empower even more developers to build the next generation of AI applications.”

Streamlining AI application development for citizen developers

The company announced the availability of MindsDB Pro, a service offering dedicated GPU-equipped instances for experimentation and deployment of AI/ML projects via the cloud. With over 150,000 open-source installations, MindsDB said that notable companies, including Bytes, Dumuso, JourneyFoods, Progressify, Precise Finance, and Rize have already employed its services to streamline their product development and internal operations.

MindsDB’s Torres emphasized data’s pivotal role in AI/ML and underscored developers’ need to access the most pertinent AI models to catalyze transformative business applications. 

Furnishing users with a comprehensive array of ML/AI frameworks, Torres says, eases user success.

“Our partnerships across the database and AI ecosystems enable users to take advantage of MindsDB’s advanced ML from within these platforms, turning their databases into powerful predictive engines,” explained Torres. “We enable integration of all of the different elements of a company’s data stack to be easily input into AI models and then the output of that AI to be put back into a data source. Our platform is the central hub connecting data sources to the most relevant AI models, enabling the creation of useful AI-powered solutions.”

Torres said that the open-source developer community has significantly contributed to advancing the company’s mission of democratizing AI development. Initially, the platform incorporated just a handful of data sources. However, in the past year, the potential has exponentially grown, driven by the power of the open-source community to independently construct integrations.

“We’ve taken a bottoms-up approach because many of our new customers of the managed version of MindsDB — MindsDB Pro — discovered us through our partners or from starting with us through our open-source product,” he said. “Now, we are focused on how to provide reliability and stability when scaling our cloud. For SMBs that often lack dedicated ML engineering teams, our managed services offer a user-friendly interface that allows non-experts to leverage machine learning effectively.”

Financial services platform Domuso, for example, used MindsDB to create and implement a reliable ML model using MindsDB’s AutoML solution, supported by machine learning experts.

Domuso engineered predictions and transitioned them into live operations, accomplishing this with its existing team and technological resources. MindsDB claims that the move resulted in a $95,000 reduction in chargebacks over a span of two months, potentially yielding savings of approximately $500,000 annually.

“MindsDB seeks to bring AI development closer to data, simplifying the generation of AI while bridging the gap between AI and the necessary data to unlock its potential,” Torres told VentureBeat. “We’re dedicated to eliminating the complexities of managing multiple AI frameworks. With our unified platform, organizations can seamlessly execute and automate a variety of AI frameworks through our platform’s extensive array of integrations.”

Lead investor NVentures joins a consortium of existing investors, including Benchmark, Mayfield, Y Combinator, OpenOcean, and Walden Catalyst in this new funding endeavor.

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