Instabase receives $45M to automate document processing

Instabase, a startup that develops apps to understand and analyze “unstructured” data, raised $45 million in a Series C round led by Tribe Capital and including Andreessen Horowitz (a16z), New Enterprise Associates, and Spark Capital.

Instabase’s valuation doubled to $2 billion as it invested more in generative AI.

“At Instabase, we’ve built a platform that’s trusted by some of the most demanding global enterprises in some of the most highly regulated industries,” Anant Bhardwaj told “Instabase lets organizations use the latest AI innovations to understand their unstructured data and build applications.”

Bhardwaj founded Instabase in 2015 while pursuing his PhD at MIT. He says a market gap for a platform to quickly build and deploy enterprise apps and data inspired him.

Instabase provides content-understanding tools. The platform queries large corpora of files—academic papers, legal documents, financial data, etc.—for companies’ operations.

In addition, Instabase provides workflow tools for analyzing similar documents. Instabase lets customers build apps to automate income and identity verification, invoice processing, and receipt verification.

Instabase’s marketplace offers pre-built apps. Apps verify passports, driver’s licenses, income, prefill tax forms, and more.

“Instabase continually identifies and evaluates emerging AI models and technologies for content understanding,” Bhardwaj said. With the innovation in this space and multiple players entering the [generative AI] race, customers will need modular technologies to quickly take advantage of the latest innovation.

San Francisco-based Instabase, with 350 employees, competes with startups and incumbents like Google Cloud, Amazon Web Services, and Azure, which offer cloud-based, AI-powered document processing and workflow automation tooling. Instabase, according to Bhardwaj, reduces the need for time-consuming, expensive, and laborious data science work.

Bhardwaj says Instabase’s platform doesn’t require companies to fine-tune or train AI models to automate workflows or build apps. They don’t need to annotate documents to train a model to extract the data they want.

Instabase’s competitors may be comparable. Instabase still has paying customers. Bhardwaj claims that four of the top five U.S. banks and financial, insurance, and consumer packaged goods firms use Instabase.

Email from a16z general partner Martin Casado:

Companies that can build deeply integrated, applied AI solutions will win in this market transformation. Instabase has solved complex enterprise content understanding problems using the latest AI technology. We’re excited to partner with Instabase as they bring this technology to all market segments.”