# Contextual AI

> Contextual AI is a Mountain View enterprise AI company that builds a context engineering platform for production-grade, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) agents. Founded in 2023 by RAG co-inventor Douwe Kiela and Amanpreet Singh, it packages retrieval, reranking and grounded language models into an end-to-end system that lets regulated enterprises deploy accurate, source-grounded AI on their own documents. The company has raised $100M from backers including Greycroft, Nvidia, Snowflake, HSBC and Bezos Expeditions, and counts Qualcomm and HSBC among its users.

- **Founded:** 2023
- **Headquarters:** Mountain View, California, United States
- **Founders:** Douwe Kiela (Co-founder & Chairman (former CEO); co-inventor of RAG, adjunct professor at Stanford), Amanpreet Singh (Co-founder & CTO)
- **Team size:** ~72-95 employees
- **Products:** Contextual AI Platform, RAG 2.0 / Contextual Language Models (CLMs), Grounded Language Model (GLM), Instruction-Following Reranker, Agent Composer
- **Notable:** Co-founded by Douwe Kiela, co-inventor of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) at Meta AI., Raised $100M total, including an $80M Series A (2024) with Nvidia, Snowflake, HSBC and Bezos Expeditions., Grounded Language Model scored 88% on the FACTS factuality benchmark, ahead of Gemini 2.0 Flash (84.6%), Claude 3.5 Sonnet (79.4%) and GPT-4o (78.8%).

## Products & services

- **Contextual AI Platform** — End-to-end context engineering platform for building specialized RAG agents in minutes, with tunable retrieval, reranking, grounded generation, evaluation and secure SaaS or on-prem deployment.
- **RAG 2.0 / Contextual Language Models (CLMs)** — An approach that trains the retriever and language model as a single optimized system rather than a bolted-together pipeline, improving accuracy and grounding while cutting latency.
- **Grounded Language Model (GLM)** — A language model tuned for maximum factual accuracy and source grounding; scored 88% on the FACTS benchmark, ahead of leading general models.
- **Instruction-Following Reranker** — The first reranker steerable with natural-language instructions (e.g. prefer recent docs or PDFs); state of the art on the BEIR benchmark.
- **Agent Composer** — Tooling to turn enterprise RAG into production-ready AI agents with orchestration over enterprise data.
- **Contextual for Finance / Contextual for Legal** — Vertical solutions pre-integrated with industry compliance frameworks to shorten time-to-value from months to weeks.

## Achievements

- Co-founded by Douwe Kiela, co-inventor of retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) at Meta AI.
- Raised $100M total, including an $80M Series A (2024) with Nvidia, Snowflake, HSBC and Bezos Expeditions.
- Grounded Language Model scored 88% on the FACTS factuality benchmark, ahead of Gemini 2.0 Flash (84.6%), Claude 3.5 Sonnet (79.4%) and GPT-4o (78.8%).
- Launched the world's first instruction-following reranker, state of the art on BEIR.
- SOC 2 certified enterprise platform with SaaS and on-prem deployment.
- General availability of the enterprise RAG platform in January 2025.

## Latest updates

- **2025-01** — Announced general availability of the Contextual AI enterprise platform for building specialized RAG agents.
- **2025-03** — Introduced the Grounded Language Model (GLM) for higher factual accuracy in enterprise AI.
- **2025-10** — Launched the world's first instruction-following reranker, achieving state-of-the-art results on the BEIR benchmark.
- **2025-12** — GLM reported 88% on the FACTS benchmark, outperforming leading general-purpose models.
- **2026-04** — Jay Chen (formerly VP of Marketing) named Interim CEO.

## Links

- Website: https://contextual.ai
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/company/contextualai
- Twitter/X: https://twitter.com/ContextualAI
- GitHub: https://github.com/ContextualAI
- Facebook: https://facebook.com/contextualai/

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/contextual-ai
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-07-21