Vectara Secures $25M Funding to Launch Mockingbird LLM for Enterprise RAG Solutions

Vectara, an early pioneer in Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) technology, is making headlines today with the announcement of a $25 million Series A funding round. This latest round brings the company’s total funding to an impressive $53.5 million. The surge in enterprise demand for Vectara’s cutting-edge technologies has played a significant role in this financial milestone.

Vectara emerged from stealth mode in October 2022, initially marketing its technology as a neural search-as-a-service platform. Over time, the company rebranded its offering as ‘grounded search,’ a term now synonymous with RAG. Grounded search and RAG fundamentally involve generating responses from a large language model (LLM) that are referenced from an enterprise knowledge base, typically stored in a vector-capable database. Vectara’s platform seamlessly integrates various components to enable a RAG pipeline, including its proprietary Boomerang vector embedding engine.

In conjunction with the new funding, Vectara announced the launch of its Mockingbird LLM, a purpose-built language model specifically designed for RAG applications. According to Amr Awadallah, co-founder and CEO of Vectara, Mockingbird is trained to be exceptionally honest in its conclusions and to adhere closely to the facts. “We are releasing a new launch language model called Mockingbird, which has been trained and fine-tuned specifically to be more honest in how it comes up with conclusions and to stick to the facts as much as possible,” Awadallah told VentureBeat in an exclusive interview.

As interest and adoption of enterprise RAG technology have surged over the past year, the market has seen numerous entrants. Database technologies such as Oracle, PostgreSQL, DataStax, Neo4j, and MongoDB now support vectors and RAG use cases. This increased availability has heightened competition. However, Awadallah emphasizes that Vectara stands out with several unique differentiators. The Vectara platform offers more than just connecting a vector database to an LLM.

• Hallucination Detection Model: Vectara has developed a model that surpasses basic RAG grounding to enhance accuracy.
• Explanations and Security: The platform provides detailed explanations for results and includes security features to protect against prompt attacks, essential for regulated industries.
• Integrated Pipeline: Unlike other solutions that require customers to assemble different components, Vectara offers an integrated RAG pipeline with all necessary elements.

“Our differentiation in a nutshell is very simple: we have the features required for regulated industries,” Awadallah explained.

With the introduction of Mockingbird, Vectara aims to further distinguish itself in the competitive enterprise RAG market. Many RAG approaches use general-purpose LLMs like OpenAI‘s GPT-4. In contrast, Mockingbird is a fine-tuned LLM optimized specifically for RAG workflows. This optimization reduces the risk of hallucinations and ensures better citations.

• Accurate Citations: Mockingbird ensures all references are included correctly, providing comprehensive citations within responses.
• Structured Outputs: The model is optimized to generate structured outputs, such as JSON, which are crucial for agent-driven AI workflows.

Awadallah highlighted the importance of structured outputs for API calls in agentic AI activities. “As you start to depend on a RAG pipeline to call APIs, you’re going to call an API to execute an agentic AI kind of activity. You really need that output to be structured in the form of an API call, and this is what we support.”

The $25 million Series A funding will enable Vectara to expand its platform capabilities and meet the growing demand from enterprise users. This financial boost comes as the company continues to innovate and strengthen its position in the RAG technology space.

Vectara’s journey from a stealth startup to a leader in RAG technology demonstrates its commitment to innovation and excellence. With its latest funding round and the launch of Mockingbird, Vectara is well-positioned to meet the evolving needs of enterprise users and continue its upward trajectory in the tech industry.

Featured Image courtesy of DALL-E by ChatGPT