LlamaIndex is a true category creator for building custom knowledge agents, and we are excited to announce that Norwest is leading the company’s $19M Series A. This investment continues our thesis of enabling the acceleration of enterprise AI adoption—specifically, delivering data preparation, data ingestion, and custom agents.
Following prior investments in companies like Gong, Vast Data, Aisera, and You.com, the LlamaIndex funding further emphasizes our belief in the transformational shift that generative AI is catalyzing.
Enter LlamaIndex: Unlocking the Full Potential of GenAI for Enterprises
LlamaIndex’s mission is to be the most accurate, secure, and user-friendly platform for building knowledge agents based on enterprise data. At the core, they convert unstructured data (such as PDFs, PPTs, and videos)—where a wealth of business-specific information resides—into a format that large language models (LLMs) can efficiently process. Developers can then use these models to build enterprise applications and AI agent workflows. The more understandable the format of the data presented to LLMs, the faster the training and the more accurate the outcomes.
The LlamaIndex platform consists of two components:
- Knowledge management layer. This layer connects, parses, extracts, and indexes unstructured data into a format that LLMs can efficiently process. This serves as the foundation for developing AI agents capable of using proprietary company information for multi-step processing.
- Agent framework layer. This layer provides AI app developers with tools to quickly build complex multi-agent systems from the trained LLMs, starting with just a few lines of code. Using core workflow abstractions, developers gain fine-grained control over essential agentic capabilities, such as human-in-the-loop, state management, tool use, and memory management.
The two layers connect with more than 600 LLMs, embedding models, vector databases, data sources, and third-party toolsets.
From Standout Open-Source Project to Enterprise Waitlist
When LlamaIndex Co-Founder and CEO Jerry Liu was developing applications in 2022 with an early version of ChatGPT, he wanted to overcome the limits on the amount and types of data he could enter into the LLM. He wanted to index and connect many different data sources to the LLM to build RAG apps, which led him to create the LlamaIndex open-source project. The framework quickly gained mass adoption by developers who felt the same pain when trying to build RAG apps. The response inspired Jerry and LlamaIndex CTO Simon Suo to go full-time on the project. They founded LlamaIndex in early 2023 with a vision to accelerate AI adoption.
Since then, they’ve done an incredible job building an enthusiastic open-source community and selling to early adopters. In just over two years, LlamaIndex has grown to more than 3 million monthly downloads and surpassed 38,000 stars on GitHub.
Enterprise developers who adopt LlamaIndex’s open-source tooling have been augmenting their applications with commercially available self-serve APIs. These include LlamaParse, which transforms unstructured data into a structured format suitable for building knowledge agents.
LlamaCloud Released, More Products to Come
This widespread adoption of LlamaIndex has resulted in a waitlist of over 10,000 organizations—including 90 Fortune 500 companies—eager to start using the newly released LlamaCloud, a fully hosted knowledge management layer for developing AI agents.
LlamaCloud consists of state-of-the-art parsing and extraction modules for the most complex documents, from financial statements to clinical assessments, slide decks, contracts, and more. It securely and reliably connects to a wide range of data sources—such as Amazon S3, Microsoft SharePoint, and Google Drive—enabling the indexing of millions of documents with LlamaIndex’s proprietary indexing and retrieval algorithms. Its enterprise-grade features include high reliability, security (RBAC and SSO), and scalability, making it a game-changing solution for AI agent development.
Developers can access LlamaCloud as a cloud-based service or deploy it within their virtual private network, providing flexibility that caters to unique customer security preferences and budgets. Upcoming products include LlamaExtract and LlamaReport, APIs that enable developers to generate various types of artifacts such as text, images, and code programmatically.
As AI adoption accelerates and use cases move to production, enterprises will continue to turn to LlamaIndex’s suite to build custom knowledge agents. We are thrilled to work with Jerry and Simon as they grow the team, release new products, and continue to lead the way on enterprise AI adoption. And if you want to help them build the future of AI, check out their open positions!
Want to learn more about Norwest’s investments in AI innovators like LlamaIndex? Reach out to us: Dave Zilberman (LinkedIn or email) and David Glaser (LinkedIn or email).
