Snowflake Invests in Contextual AI to Make It Easier for Enterprises to Deploy RAG Applications in the AI Data Cloud

Following our investment, Snowflake customers will be able to deploy Contextual AI as a Native Application directly within their Snowflake account, simplifying and accelerating RAG deployment for a wider set of users. 

Contextual AI supports a variety of use cases for RAG at scale, including contextual search, chatbots and contextual parsing. For example, its customers include major financial services organizations that depend on Contextual AI to build applications that parse and analyze large volumes of SEC filings to surface insights and guide decision-making.

This investment complements the capabilities of Snowflake Cortex AI, our suite of tools and features for building AI-powered applications. Cortex AI already includes technologies for RAG development, and Contextual AI further expands the options for customers who want a packaged and comprehensive solution that can be deployed quickly and easily.

Contextual AI was co-founded by CEO Douwe Kiela, who previously led research at Meta’s Fundamental AI Research (FAIR) team, where he pioneered Retrieval Augmented Generation (RAG) and other significant AI advancements. Douwe is also former head of research at Hugging Face and an Adjunct Professor in Symbolic Systems at Stanford University. His co-founder is CTO Amanpreet Singh, who has a background in research engineering at Hugging Face and Meta’s FAIR team. The company recently launched RAG 2.0, an update to its Contextual Language Model with benchmarks that outperform alternatives for retrieval augmented generation tasks. 

We look forward to working closely with Douwe and his team to ensure that Snowflake customers can benefit from further enhancements to their product in the future.