Carbon, a Seattle startup that helps companies connect external data sources to their large language models, raised a $1.3 million seed round to fuel growth.
Founded last year by longtime friends Derek Tu and Aditya Chempakasseril, Carbon aims to ride tailwinds from the generative AI rush by streamlining the way LLMs access unstructured data from third-party applications like Google Drive and SharePoint.
The idea is to replace custom pipelines companies need to build to make that type of data — ranging from text, audio, and image — available to LLMs.
Carbon’s customers include Jenni.ai, AskAI, and DrLambda.
Tu, Carbon’s CEO, was previously a tech leader and early employee at Los Angeles e-commerce company Italic, and held product roles at Wayfair, Flywire, and 6sense. Chempakasseril was an engineer at Italic and has a master’s in computational science from the University of San Diego.
Carbon has four employees.
Investors in the seed round include Treble and MKT1, along with several angels.
“The Carbon team is tackling a massive market opportunity — all companies from SMBs and Fortune 500 enterprises are reckoning with how to leverage AI on their proprietary data, and Carbon offers a turn-key solution,” Daniel Gulati, founder of Treble, said in a statement.
