Seattle-based startup Carbon has successfully secured $1.3 million in a seed funding round to support its growth. Co-founded last year by Derek Tu and Aditya Chempakasseril, Carbon specializes in assisting companies in connecting external data sources to their large language models (LLMs).
The startup aims to simplify the process for LLMs to access unstructured data from third-party applications like Google Drive and SharePoint, eliminating the need for custom pipelines that companies typically build for making various data types, including text, audio, and images, available to LLMs.
Carbon’s clientele includes companies such as Jenni.ai, AskAI, and DrLambda. Derek Tu, Carbon’s CEO, brings a wealth of experience as a tech leader and early employee at Los Angeles-based e-commerce company Italic, and has held product roles at Wayfair, Flywire, and 6sense. Aditya Chempakasseril, an engineer at Italic, holds a master’s degree in computational science from the University of San Diego.
The seed round saw participation from investors Treble and MKT1, along with contributions from several angel investors. Daniel Gulati, founder of Treble, emphasized the significant market opportunity Carbon is addressing, noting that companies of all sizes, from SMBs to Fortune 500 enterprises, are grappling with how to leverage AI on their proprietary data, and Carbon provides a turn-key solution to this challenge.
