A new AI research organization named Fundamental has officially launched, introducing a novel foundation model designed to address a longstanding challenge: extracting meaningful insights from the vast amounts of structured data generated by large companies. By integrating traditional predictive AI systems with more modern approaches, the firm aims to transform how major enterprises conduct data analysis. “With our model Nexus, we have built the best foundation model to handle that type of data.”

This vision has already attracted considerable investor attention. The company is launching with $255 million in funding and a valuation of $1.2 billion. Most of this capital stems from a recent $225 million Series A round, led by Oak HC/FT, Valor Equity Partners, Battery Ventures, and Salesforce Ventures. Hetz Ventures also joined the Series A, alongside angel investments from Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas, Brex co-founder Henrique Dubugras, and Datadog CEO Olivier Pomel.

Rather than being a Large Language Model (LLM), Fundamental’s Nexus is classified as a Large Tabular Model (LTM), representing a significant departure from current AI conventions. The model is deterministic, meaning it provides identical answers to the same question every time, and it does not utilize the transformer architecture common to most modern AI systems. Fundamental describes it as a foundation model because it undergoes standard pre-training and fine-tuning processes, yet the final product is fundamentally different from what a client would obtain from partners like OpenAI or Anthropic.

These distinctions are crucial, as Fundamental is targeting an area where contemporary AI models frequently struggle. Transformer-based models are limited by their context window, making it difficult for them to reason across massive datasets—such as analyzing a spreadsheet with billions of rows. However, such extensive structured data is typical within large corporations, presenting a major opportunity for models capable of managing that scale.

According to Fundamental, this represents a substantial prospect for the company. Through Nexus, it can apply modern techniques to Big Data analytics, delivering solutions that are more powerful and adaptable than existing algorithms. “And on each one of those use cases, you get better performance than what you would otherwise be able to do with an army of data scientists.”

This potential has already secured several notable contracts, including multi-million-dollar agreements with Fortune 100 clients. Additionally, the company has formed a strategic partnership with AWS, enabling AWS users to deploy Nexus directly from their existing instances.