Hebbia Raises $30 Million, Led by Index Ventures, to Launch the Future of Search

Hebbia, a company reinventing search with natural language understanding, today announced a $30 million Series A round. The round was led by Mike Volpi, Partner at Index Ventures. Several of the world’s boldest search and AI investors also participated, including Jerry Yang, Yahoo founder and CEO, and Ram Shriram, founding board member and one of the first investors in Google. Marty Chavez, another Alphabet board member, Stanley Druckenmiller, Kevin Warsh, Julius Genachowski, Alexandr Wang, Pieter Abbeel, Henrique Dubugras, and Raquel Urtasun joined the seed as well. Peter Thiel is an advisor and investor.

Google has only indexed 4% of the world’s data. Hebbia is unleashing the other 96% to become the central platform for the knowledge worker economy.

Hebbia’s AI reads and comprehends the untouched universe of unstructured, private data.

Its “neural search” outperforms the current state of the art in machine learning information retrieval by an average of 57% on complex datasets.

Search 10X Faster and 10X More Accurate

Hebbia is finding early traction in the financial services industry where firms spend $100B deploying teams to pore over high-stakes deal rooms for 60+ hours a week. The young firm has seen rapid adoption, already counting several of the world’s largest private equity firms, hedge funds, consultancies, and government projects as paying customers.

While digital content is exponentially increasing in data rooms and private servers, the time analysts have to navigate that content has remained constant. This is a world where errors are costly; a single diligence mistake can lead to losses in excess of eight figures. Hebbia completely transforms this workflow by automating the rote steps of the investing process and allowing teams to find every deal point more accurately.

Hebbia can index anything — scanned PDFs, PowerPoints, spreadsheets, transcripts — and instantly spin up an encrypted expert search engine to answer your most complex questions. From broad market research to targeted information extraction, Hebbia acts as an AI Analyst, surfacing deal points even humans miss.

Elevating Search Through Years of Research

“AI that comprehends human language will grow into the most impactful invention of the next decade,” said George Sivulka, founder and CEO of Hebbia. “We’re starting by transforming the financial services industry, but that’s just the beginning.”

Hebbia was founded by George Sivulka, a Stanford Ph.D. dropout with a research track record across many fields. After working at NASA at the age of 16, Sivulka published a paper on computational simulation that won an international scientific conference. At Stanford University, he earned his BS in mathematics with distinction in just over two years. Sivulka went on to complete his master’s in applied physics before embarking on a Ph.D. at Stanford in artificial intelligence.

During Sivulka’s doctoral research, many of his friends gravitated to finance, working on mergers and acquisitions, and scrambling over thousands of documents in 100-hour work weeks. Identifying a problem that NLP could solve, Sivulka set out to build the world’s most intelligent search engine — one which leveraged his research to empower organizations to securely index every document created, shared, or collaborated.

Index Ventures led Hebbia’s $30 million Series A, with Radical Ventures joining the round. Funding will be used to build out Hebbia’s engineering team and accelerate the development of its neural search engine.

“Hebbia is attacking a multi-billion dollar problem that has stumped industry for years: how does a company efficiently leverage sensitive data at scale? The answer is in Hebbia’s technology,” said Mike Volpi, Partner at Index Ventures. “George and the Hebbia team will change how each of us find the answers we seek. We look forward to helping Hebbia continue to scale.”