Insider Brief
- Cloudsquid, an AI-Agent platform focused on extracting and structuring unstructured data, raised $1 million in pre-seed funding led by High-Tech Gründerfonds and Backbone Ventures to advance its data transformation technology.
- The platform uses a universal API to turn complex, unstructured documents (like PDFs, emails, and images) into structured data for integration with ERPs, CRMs, and other systems, eliminating manual data entry and enabling engineering teams to focus on product development.
- With the new funds, Cloudsquid aims to grow its engineering team, expand its core platform, and release a Freemium plan by late 2024, making its data integration solutions accessible to a wider range of businesses.
PRESS RELEASE — Cloudsquid, an AI-Agent platform specializing in extracting and transforming unstructured data, today announced a successful $1 million pre-seed funding round. The round was led by High-Tech Gründerfonds and Backbone Ventures, with participation from angel investors Reetu Kainulainen (Founder Ultimate AI) and Udi Miron (VP Product Ultimate AI). The funding will accelerate Cloudsquid’s mission to tackle data extraction and integration from complex document files using Generative AI.
Over 80% of enterprise data remains trapped in unstructured formats, including documents, emails, CSVs, and images. Cloudsquid addresses this challenge with a universal API capable of ingesting files in any format, transforming them into structured data, and integrating directly with downstream systems like databases, ERPs, and CRMs. By solving this data integration challenge at the initial intake step, engineering and data teams can bypass manual data entry workflows entirely and focus on building new powerful user experiences for end customers and internal teams.
“Working closely with these organizations has been eye-opening,” said Cloudsquid co-founder and CEO Mike McCarthy. “Whole teams of people are spending the majority of their work day transferring fields from PDFs into back office systems. It’s a huge waste of potential amid Europe’s skilled labor shortage. AI can solve these legacy bottlenecks quickly, we are able to help these companies skip a few steps forward on the digitization journey immediately.”
Rather than designing a SaaS application tailored to specific workflows, Cloudsquid’s co-founders Sangwoo Bae and Filip Rejmus share a more foundational vision: solving these data challenges at the infrastructure level for technical teams. “We spoke with many product teams working to build similar AI functionalities in-house and found they often faced critical last-mile challenges with accuracy and reliability that stopped them from going into production,” Sangwoo explained. “Creating an AI pipeline from scratch that processes complex documents at scale, designing interfaces to refine and test prompts, and implementing essential features like observability, is an impractical undertaking that’s leading to months of wasted effort and failed projects.”
Already serving customers ranging from high-growth tech startups to established enterprises, Cloudsquid will leverage the new funding to expand its engineering team and scale its core platform. With a General Availability release and a Freemium plan planned by the end of 2024, Cloudsquid is poised to make its platform accessible to an even broader audience.
Björn Sykora, Principal at HTGF, said: “Cloudsquid is transforming how companies deal with their unstructured data, bringing much-needed ease of accessibility to all kinds of industries. Mike, Filip and Sangwoo are an outstanding team and we are excited to support them on their mission.”
“The combined skillset of Mike, Filip, and Sang strongly reflects our 5502 Fund’s thesis. They embody the immigrant founder spirit — driven, adaptable, and focused on building a great product and company,” added Dr. Jan Claudio Muñoz, General Partner, Backbone Ventures.
About Cloudsquid
Cloudsquid offers a scalable, secure platform for building unstructured data pipelines, enabling engineering and data teams to focus on core product functionality rather than data integration. Founded in 2023 in Berlin by Filip Rejmus (formerly of Taktile and Uber), Sangwoo Bae (formerly of AWS and Kubermatic), and Mike McCarthy, an early team member and revenue leader at Ultimate AI. Cloudsquid is committed to unlocking the value of unstructured data for businesses of all sizes.
Contact
Cloudsquid GmbH
[email protected]
cloudsquid.io
About HTGF — High-Tech Gründerfonds
HTGF is one of the leading and most active early-stage investors in Germany and Europe, financing start-ups in the fields of Deep Tech, Industrial Tech, Climate Tech, Digital Tech, Life Sciences and Chemistry. With its experienced investment team, HTGF supports start-ups in all phases of their development into international market leaders. HTGF invests in pre-seed and seed phases and can participate significantly in later-stage financing rounds. Across its funds, HTGF has over 2 billion euros under management. Since its inception in 2005, HTGF has financed more than 750 start-ups and achieved over 180 successful exits.
Fund investors in the public-private partnership include the German Federal Ministry of Economics and Climate Action, KfW Capital as well as 45 companies and family offices.
For more information, please visit HTGF.de or follow us on LinkedIn.
Media contact
High-Tech Gründerfonds Management GmbH
Tobias Jacob, Senior Marketing & Communications Manager
T.: +49 228–82300–121
[email protected]
Featured image: Founding team of Cloudsquid. Credit: Cloudsquid
