LlamaIndex, a startup that allows developers to build custom AI-powered agents over unstructured data, has raised $19 million in a Series A funding round led by Norwest Venture Partners, with participation from Greylock. This brings the company's total funding to $27.5 million, which will be used to expand its 20-person team and drive product development.

The startup, founded by former Uber research scientists Jerry Liu and Simon Suo in 2023, has been gaining traction with its open-source software that has racked up millions of downloads on GitHub. LlamaIndex's platform enables developers to create custom agents that can extract information, generate reports and insights, and take specific actions. The platform provides data connectors and utilities like LlamaParse, which transforms unstructured data into a structured format that can be used for particular AI applications.

According to Liu, LlamaIndex is differentiated from other open-source frameworks by its suite of data ingestion, data management, and data indexing and retrieval solutions. The platform can connect data from files like PDFs and PowerPoint presentations, as well as apps such as Notion and Slack, with an agent. This has attracted the attention of major companies like Salesforce, KPMG, and Carlyle, which are already using LlamaIndex today.

Liu emphasized that while there are other open-source frameworks to build AI agents, they often solve specific problems at different parts of the generative AI stack, leaving it to the developer to piece together fragmented solutions to create a working agent. LlamaIndex aims to deliver a more comprehensive platform for building end-to-end knowledge agents.

The company's next chapter is an enterprise service built on top of its open-source offerings, called LlamaCloud. This service lets customers create cloud-hosted agents that can work with and manipulate unstructured data in a variety of formats. LlamaCloud can be deployed via a software-as-a-service installation or in a virtual private cloud, and comes with features including role-based access control and single sign-on.

The funding will be instrumental in driving the development of LlamaCloud, as well as expanding the company's team. Liu expressed confidence in the company's future, stating that they have sufficient runway to take them through initial commercial expansion of their platform. He also emphasized the importance of developers in delivering GenAI applications within the enterprise, a vision that LlamaIndex is betting on.

The rise of AI-powered agents is expected to have significant implications for various industries, and LlamaIndex is well-positioned to be at the forefront of this trend. As the company continues to grow and develop its platform, it will be interesting to see how its technology is adopted and used by developers and enterprises alike.