Freeing Humans to Do their Best Work

I call it ‘the magic demo:’-- the demo that recruits world-class tech talent, persuades top global banks to become customers, and made it obvious that we had to invest in Anant Bhardwaj’s vision.

To see Anant demo the Instabase product is to see the future of how work will be done. When we first met Anant at his office, it was filled with several hard-working engineers and a recently vacated tent that I learned was occasionally used after long nights spent writing code. Anant’s demo showed how the platform and a series of apps that he and his team built could be used to automate many critical business processes across industries that previous technologies had not been able to automate.

One of the first lessons I learned as a student of economics is that macroeconomic growth is largely driven by improvements in productivity, which are fundamentally driven by technological innovation. In the words of economist Paul Krugman, “Productivity isn’t everything, but in the long run, it is almost everything.” Over the past century technologies such as the personal computer, the internet, and the smartphone have led to step-function improvements. With impressive advancements in AI, we are likely on the eve of another such transformation.

While at MIT, Anant studied at the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory, placing him at the intersection of data management, human-computer interaction and machine learning. Instabase was born as a new way to approach company-scale operational challenges leveraging these new technology advancements. The company provides a series of tools that enable its customers to perform complex tasks such as extracting structured data from images, identifying differences between documents, and surfacing relevant content and context from thousands of pages.

In our consumer lives, the mobile phone has become a remote control from which you could order and procure any product or service you desire on-demand. Yet, when you go to a doctor’s office or walk into a bank branch, you still need to fill out tedious paperwork and wait for days or weeks for a decision. By improving process efficiency, Instabase enables enterprises to deliver better services to their customers. If you were to start a challenger bank today using Instabase software, you would be able to deliver services such as customer onboarding or loan underwriting faster, providing a significant competitive advantage. It’s this value proposition that has led multiple global enterprises to become customers deploying Instabase across business units and geographies.

We are thrilled to be embarking on this journey with Anant, a technical genius, his remarkably talented team and their existing investors including Andreessen Horowitz, Greylock, NEA, and Spark, who also joined this round. Instabase is a generation-defining business, enabling workers to be the most productive they can be by focusing on the work only humans can do - with the highest value add and the most rewarding.