Fundamental raises $255M and debuts NEXUS
San Francisco-based startup Fundamental, founded by former DeepMind researchers, has raised $255 million and publicly launched NEXUS, a model built to predict outcomes from enterprise tabular data such as spreadsheets and structured databases.
The financing includes a $30 million seed round and a $225 million Series A led by Oak HC/FT, with participation from Valor Equity Partners, Battery Ventures, Salesforce Ventures, and Hetz Ventures. The company said the new capital will be used to scale compute, expand enterprise deployments, and grow its research, engineering, and go-to-market teams.
A bet on tables, not text
While much of the recent AI boom has centered on large language models and multimodal systems optimized for text, images, and video, many high-stakes corporate decisions still depend on structured records—pricing tables, forecasts, risk models, and customer behavior datasets. Fundamental argues that this “tabular” layer has been underserved by modern deep learning.
Jeremy Fraenkel, CEO and co-founder of Fundamental, described NEXUS as a foundation model trained “from the ground up” on billions of tabular datasets, designed to understand relationships across rows and columns and operate at enterprise scale with minimal manual setup. The company claims it can be integrated into existing data stacks with minimal effort and can learn patterns without extensive feature engineering.
AWS partnership and early enterprise traction
Alongside the funding, Fundamental announced a strategic partnership with Amazon Web Services, enabling customers to buy and deploy NEXUS through the AWS dashboard. Dave Brown, AWS VP of Compute, Platforms & ML Services, said the partnership aims to make structured data “a powerful predictive asset” with enterprise-grade security and scalability.
Fundamental also said it has already secured seven-figure contracts with Fortune 100 companies using NEXUS for real-world predictive applications.
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