dottxt is a French ecosystem and platform for interacting with LLMs. In a recent development, the company has announced a combined raise of $11.9 million in funding via both pre-seed and seed rounds in just over seven months.
Investment details
The funding is split into a $3.2 million pre-seed round, completed in December 2023 and led by European tech and deep tech VC firm Elaia. dottxt quickly followed with a seed round, which closed recently at $8.7 million and was led by EQT Ventures.
Further participants in the two funding rounds include Seedcamp, Common Magic, Kima, FSJ, Roxanne Varza (Station F), Erik Bernhardsson (Modal Labs, CEO), Julien Chaumond (Hugging Face, CTO), Bob van Luijt (Weaviate, CEO) and Jean-Louis Queguiner (Gladia, CEO).
The funding will be used to grow the team after demand for dottxt’s open source library and its proprietary, optimised, counterpart has sharply increased since early 2024.
It will also bolster the number of software engineers, and bring in a Chief of Staff. Currently, the team of nine added six more employees, to focus on expanding the reach of dottxt’s technology and distributing it to enterprises and developers alike.
How was the idea born?
dottxt was founded by Rémi Louf, Dan Gerlanc, and Brandon Willard, who worked together in various capacities for the past four years. During their last stint at a New York-based AI firm, Normal Computing, they started encountering issues with GPT-4, notably extracting data and information in a systemised order to bypass vast amounts of manual work.
With the aim to solve this issue, the team invented a solution that no one else had been able to find. A year later, the code they open-sourced received over 3 million downloads, 600,000 of which were in the last month. Companies, large and small, are using it in production.
dottxt’s mission is to make AI programmable so its potential meets the reliability demands of real-world systems.
Empowers users control LLMs
The French startup greatly improves the capabilities of LLMs. By allowing the user to request information with a specific structure, dottxt transforms LLMs into tools that integrate seamlessly with existing digital ecosystems.
Its functionality elevates LLMs from simple back-and-forth chat functions to dependable computers. Data scientists can make natural language queries to a database with a guarantee that the query will succeed.
For instance, someone looking to hire and facing a mountain of CVs can ask the service to filter through looking for specific experience or qualifications, saving significant time. Someone looking to extract specific attributes from a large bank of images can send the service the images and list of attributes and get the information back quickly.
OpenAI and Cohere are early leaders in the race to dominate AI-based text generation; both have previously and publicly cited their use of the dottxt open source code.
Rémi Louf, CEO at dottxt, said: “Everyone will be using structured generation in a few years, there is no doubt about that. Model providers, including OpenAI, are lagging in terms of speed and capabilities, and we’re here to fill that gap. With these funds, we will keep pushing the limits of this technology and make it more widely available for everyone. We are shaping a future where generative AI delivers on the kind of automation we were promised.”
Investors’ opinion
Julien Hobeika, Partner at EQT Ventures, added: “From our first discussion with dottxt, we saw their potential to turn the stochastic nature of LLMs into something more programmatic and deterministic, enabling deep integration into software systems. This aligns with our belief that the future of AI agents will be shaped by those who can build the essential frameworks that make LLMs truly usable at scale in critical enterprise systems. We’re excited to support dottxt as they lead the creation of this critical infrastructure.”
Clement Vanden Driessche, Investment Director at Elaia, said: “In a new software era led by the emergence of AI agents, developers experiment with a strong need to constrain the LLM models’ behaviour to make the final applications faster, robust, and reliable. At Elaia, we are proud to support dottxt team, from their inception and even before, who developed a proprietary technology inspired by compilers. We are excited to see them grow in the open-source ecosystem with an incredible developers adoption to date.”
Sia Houchangnia, Partner at Seedcamp, said, “LLMs already have the potential to unlock tremendous value, but their lack of reliability has been the key barrier to wider adoption. dottxt solves this problem. By applying their expertise in Bayesian statistics, Remi, Brandon, Dan, and their team have created the most accurate and high-performing platform for structured generation. We are proud to be day-one backers of the company and are convinced that dottxt has the potential to become the default framework for LLM programming.”
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