Why Hebbia’s AI Isn’t a Chatbot and Why That Matters for Enterprise Search

Hebbia has secured $130 million in a Series B funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz, propelling the startup to a valuation of approximately $700 million. This capital injection follows a previous $30 million Series A and includes participation from Google Ventures, Peter Thiel, and Index Ventures. The company is focused on indexing the 96 percent of global data that remains inaccessible to traditional search engines, serving as a critical tool for the knowledge worker economy.

The startup’s flagship product, Matrix, functions as an AI analyst that processes millions of documents through a spreadsheet-like interface. Unlike standard chatbots, this system allows users to extract specific data points across vast datasets with verified citations for every answer. This neural search technology reportedly outperforms traditional machine learning retrieval models by an average of 57 percent when handling complex datasets.

The platform has gained significant traction in high-stakes industries such as finance and law. Currently, more than 30 percent of the top 50 global asset managers use the technology to automate document-heavy workflows. During the Silicon Valley Bank crisis, firms relied on the software to instantly map financial exposure across thousands of portfolio documents, completing tasks in minutes that previously required weeks of manual labor.

George Sivulka, a Stanford doctoral researcher, founded the company to automate the intensive manual work he witnessed in the finance sector. With a background at NASA and advanced degrees in mathematics and applied physics, Sivulka designed the engine to handle scanned PDFs, transcripts, and oversized spreadsheets. The firm is now scaling its engineering team to expand these agentic workflows into broader corporate and government projects.

The recent expansion builds upon early support from prominent investors like Yahoo founder Jerry Yang and former Goldman Sachs CFO Marty Chavez. This bridge between Silicon Valley and Wall Street has allowed the company to move beyond simple search into the realm of structured reasoning. By providing a secure environment for sensitive data, the firm has become a primary choice for organizations that manage high-liability information.