AI startup Fundamental has emerged from stealth with an impressive $255 million in funding and a bold new approach to enterprise data analysis. The company announced a $225 million Series A round led by Oak HC/FT, Valor Equity Partners, Battery Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures, with participation from Hetz Ventures and notable angels including Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, Brex co-founder Henrique Dubugras, and Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel.
The raise values Fundamental at $1.2 billion, instantly positioning it among the most highly valued AI startups of 2026. Unlike most AI companies focused on unstructured data like text, audio, and video, Fundamental is targeting a long-standing enterprise challenge: analyzing massive structured datasets.
CEO Jeremy Fraenkel explained that while large language models (LLMs) excel at conversational tasks, they struggle with tables, spreadsheets, and large-scale business datasets that often contain billions of rows. Fundamental’s solution is Nexus, a new type of foundation model designed specifically for structured data.
Rather than using traditional transformer architectures, Nexus is built as a Large Tabular Model (LTM) a deterministic system that produces the same output every time it’s given the same input. This predictability is especially important in enterprise environments where financial forecasting, risk modeling, and compliance analysis require consistent, auditable results. Fundamental still follows modern AI practices such as pre-training and fine-tuning, but the end product differs significantly from offerings by OpenAI or Anthropic.
The company believes Nexus can reshape big data analytics by replacing fragmented, task-specific machine learning pipelines with a single adaptable model. According to Fraenkel, enterprises can deploy one system across multiple use cases from fraud detection and supply chain forecasting to customer segmentation while achieving better performance than traditional approaches powered by large teams of data scientists.
Investor interest reflects the growing demand for AI solutions that work effectively with enterprise-scale structured data. Fundamental has already secured seven-figure contracts with Fortune 100 companies, demonstrating strong early market traction. It has also formed a strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services (AWS), enabling customers to deploy Nexus directly within their existing cloud environments.
As businesses generate ever-larger volumes of structured data, the limitations of conventional analytics tools are becoming increasingly clear. Fundamental’s Nexus aims to bridge that gap by combining the rigor of predictive AI with the flexibility of modern foundation models. If successful, the company could redefine how enterprises extract value from their data shifting big data analysis from fragmented workflows to a unified, AI-driven platform built for scale, accuracy, and reliability.
