By clicking “Accept All Cookies”, you agree to the storing of cookies on your device to enhance site navigation, analyze site usage, and assist in our marketing efforts. View our Privacy Policy for more information.
Superlinked, the solution for turning complex data into vector embeddings, today announced it has received $9.5 million in seed funding. The round was led by Index Ventures, with a significant contribution from Theory Ventures. 20Sales, Firestreak and several prominent tech executives also participated. News of the funding comes as Superlinked launches a private alpha of its product and closes enterprise customer contracts to make data accessible for ML systems in information retrieval and feature engineering. The fresh capital will be used to further scale to meet market demand and expand product capabilities, building on Superlinked’s technology that makes structured and unstructured data ML-compatible, and therefore useful, for creating new solutions and deriving additional value from data on top of vectors.
Superlinked was founded by Daniel Svonava, an ML engineer previously with Google, where he built core ML infrastructure for YouTube Ads - focusing on the prediction of user behaviour and Ben Gutkovich was previously a software engineer who supported Fortune 500 corporations with digital transformation as a Strategy Consultant at McKinsey's London office.
We first met Daniel and Ben over 3 years ago, initially building ML infrastructure to improve search and recommendation within digital communities. The team has since iterated extensively, shipped product at lightning pace and had the persistent curiosity to create their category-defining product in this space.
At Concept, given our pre-seed focus, we’re excited to see validation of the traits that both Daniel and Ben exhibited and complemented each other with. Where others may have got caught up on challenges with GTM, distribution and long-term vision, our unique people-centric lens gave us the conviction to invest in Daniel and Ben - ultimately leading their pre-seed round. Our motivations to invest in Superlinked at pre-seed are a testament to our belief that people are at the heart of pre-seed, and we’re excited to continue to back the team in their efforts to realise the opportunities to solve within vector databases.
“Concept was one of the first institutional supporters of Superlinked and vital to getting us to where we are now… as a dedicated pre-seed fund, their speed, flexibility and best interest in us as founders has been consistent throughout working with them. Ariel and the team have been a great addition to Superlinked’s journey and day one believers in us as people” - Daniel Svonava, Co-Founder and CEO at Superlinked
Since our investment, the pair set out to build Superlinked to provide data scientists and software engineers with the ability to ship a product or feature with an ML-powered Search, Recommendation system, and Analytics pipeline or RAG interface that works in hours or days versus the typical months or quarters by connecting the company’s data infrastructure to a vector database. They have since assembled a team with a combined 160 years of ML, software, and company-building experience to accomplish this goal.
“Vectors power most of what you already do online - hailing a cab, finding a funny video, getting a date, scrolling through a shopping feed or paying with a card. But even the best companies only use vectors for a handful of tasks - it’s just too difficult,” said Svonava, Superlinked CEO and co-founder. “We work in tandem with vector databases to put vectors at the centre of enterprise data and compute infrastructure, democratizing the power that was once exclusive to a handful of tech giants.”
The fundamental issue in ML-powered information retrieval today is that its objectives and the underlying enterprise data are far too complex to be vectorised by pre-trained LLMs. Addressing this challenge with a future-proof retrieval stack entails focusing on two primary components: compute (turning data into vectors) and search (indexing and managing vectors). While considerable attention has been given to the search aspect, with over $250 million already invested in vector databases over the last two years, companies have grappled with overcoming the compute challenge. This is where Superlinked plays a pivotal role. It offers a compute framework to turn ALL kinds of data into vector embeddings, optimizing retrieval control, quality, and efficiency in real-time so that companies can build actual smart software faster and easier than ever before.
As enterprises start experimenting with GenAI models and upgrade their search systems to use vectors, they face the difficult choice between giving up control of the results and giving up on the promise of the technology of the future. With Superlinked, they can now have both.
Currently, other vendors either over-focus on textual data by only supporting pre-trained LLMs, model fine-tuning, and efficient inference OR they enable generalized model building within the PyTorch and Tensorflow ecosystems - which requires deep ML expertise. Superlinked aims to bridge both worlds on top of a solid data engineering foundation - to democratize the building of vector-powered systems.
“AI has fundamentally changed the way businesses are interacting with software and data, in both operations and for end-user experiences,” said Greg Maxson, Global Lead, AI GTM at MongoDB. “Vector databases and embeddings have simplified generative AI and semantic search capabilities into real-time applications, changing the way developers build applications. MongoDB’s partnership with Superlinked makes it easier for customers to create and synchronize vector embeddings for complex data required for enterprise retrieval augmented generation and other use cases, including analytics or more standard semantic search and recommendation systems.”
.png)
We are always on the hunt for more excellent founders with audacious ambitions such as Superlinked. If you are at the beginning of your 10-year journey, and raising a pre-seed round, reach out to the Concept Team.
Concept is the UK's dedicated pre-seed fund, backing founders at the earliest stages of their journey through our people-centric investment approach.
