We’re thrilled to announce that we’re leading the $2.8M first check round of Rig, the data context engine built by Toby Mather and Jakub Langr out of Entrepreneur First. AI is only as useful as the company data it can reach. Rig is the layer in between – the context, permissions and orchestrated access that let a team’s AI tools work safely on real data.
Here’s the problem: company data lives in warehouses only analysts can query, so every question from sales, ops or support joins a ticket queue. And letting AI agents loose on the warehouse directly is worse. They burn tokens rediscovering the schema on every query, return confidently wrong numbers, and can read anything – salaries, customer PII – that nobody remembered to fence off. Slow, expensive, dangerous, and it still doesn’t work. Rig maps a company’s data automatically, keeps the map current as schemas change, and serves it to each person’s AI tools with permissions enforced and PII masked. At Cleo, the Series C fintech, that took working with data from three analysts to 200 business users.
We’ve known Toby for years. He founded Lingumi, grew it to more than 2M young learners, sold it to Novakid – then, as Novakid’s chief product officer, spent two years wrestling a warehouse 8,000 tables deep. Jakub was a forward-deployed engineer at Palantir, wrote the book on GANs (literally) and carried out of Palantir the lesson Rig is built on: don’t build analytics, build workflows.
When we ran Rig past our Venture Partner community, the response settled it. These executives and operators are exactly who Rig sells to, so we asked them; the calls turned into demo requests on the spot. By the time we closed, thirty introductions were already live.
“Whoever organises a company’s context decides how useful its AI gets to be – that’s why we called knowledge management the hottest layer of our Work thesis two years ago, and why we then sat on our hands until the right team appeared. Toby lived this problem from the inside; Jakub spent years at Palantir learning what actually survives contact with an enterprise. And the impact is wonderful to see in action: every workflow Rig runs is half an hour handed back to a person who’d otherwise be copying numbers between tabs. Multiply that by every business team in the world. That’s the company we’ve been waiting to partner with.”
Jan, Emerge
The round funds Rig’s first hires and proving the deployment playbook across its first cohort of customers.
Toby, Jakub – welcome (back) to the Emerge community. Now let’s plug in.
Featured in Scaling Europe.
