Artificial intelligence lab Fundamental has emerged from stealth, announcing $255 million in funding to commercialize its new foundation model designed for structured enterprise data. The company, now valued at $1.2 billion, aims to solve a long-standing challenge where modern AI has faltered, offering a powerful tool for predictive analysis. Its flagship model, Nexus, introduces a new category of AI known as a Large Tabular Model (LTM) to transform how businesses leverage their vast datasets.
A New Approach for Enterprise Data
While Large Language Models (LLMs) excel with unstructured content like text and images, they struggle to interpret the complex, non-linear relationships within large-scale tabular data. Fundamental addresses this gap with Nexus, a deterministic model built on a non-transformer architecture specifically for this purpose. This design ensures consistent and reliable outputs, a critical requirement for enterprise decision-making.
Developed by alumni from DeepMind, Nexus is engineered to ingest raw tabular data and automatically identify underlying patterns and dependencies. This capability eliminates the need for extensive manual feature engineering, allowing enterprises to generate highly accurate predictions with greater efficiency. The model effectively replaces antiquated machine learning algorithms with a more powerful and streamlined solution.
Significant Financial Backing and Market Validation
The company's substantial funding includes a $30 million seed round and a recent $225 million Series A led by Oak HC/FT, with participation from Valor Equity Partners, Battery Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures. This significant investment underscores strong investor confidence in Fundamental's technology and its potential to capture a largely untapped market. The capital will be used to scale compute resources, expand enterprise deployments, and grow the team.
Even before its public launch, Fundamental has demonstrated significant market traction by securing multiple seven-figure contracts with Fortune 100 clients. These early adopters are applying the Nexus model to critical use cases such as demand forecasting, price prediction, and customer churn analysis. This immediate enterprise adoption serves as powerful validation for the model's real-world value and performance.
Strategic Partnership with AWS
To accelerate enterprise adoption, Fundamental has established a strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS). This collaboration makes the Nexus model directly available to AWS customers through their existing dashboards, simplifying procurement and deployment. The integration aims to provide a seamless pathway for businesses to leverage advanced predictive AI within their established cloud environments.
Through this partnership, customers can deploy Nexus with the enterprise-grade security, reliability, and scalability that the AWS infrastructure provides. According to AWS, this collaboration helps fill a crucial gap in comprehensive tabular data analysis at scale. It transforms the backbone of enterprise decision-making—tabular data—into a powerful and accessible predictive asset for businesses of all sizes.
The Vision for Predictive Intelligence
Fundamental’s technology empowers organizations to shift from retrospective analysis to forward-looking predictive intelligence. The Nexus model enables businesses to answer critical questions about future events, risks, and opportunities with unprecedented accuracy. This capability is poised to support virtually every industry, from predicting financial fraud to forecasting energy prices.
By providing a single, generalized foundation model for all tabular data use cases, Fundamental allows companies to massively expand their analytical capabilities. CEO Jeremy Fraenkel noted that Nexus can deliver superior performance compared to what could be achieved with an entire team of data scientists. This efficiency promises to unlock trillions of dollars in business value by turning structured data into actionable predictions.
With its public launch, substantial funding, and a validated product, Fundamental is positioned to redefine the enterprise AI landscape. The introduction of its Nexus Large Tabular Model marks a significant milestone, offering a purpose-built solution for the world's most valuable business data. As enterprises continue to seek a competitive edge, the power to predict with accuracy will become an indispensable asset, and Fundamental is leading the charge.