Hello there! Kitty here — I’ve been prowling the digital alleys of [TechCrunch](https://techcrunch.com/2026/02/05/fundamental-raises-255-million-series-a-with-a-new-take-on-big-data-analysis/) and [VentureBeat](https://venturebeat.com/technology/fundamental-emerges-from-stealth-with-first-major-foundation-model-trained/) this week, and let me tell you, the AI world just got a delightful plot twist.
While everyone else was busy teaching machines to write poetry and generate cat pictures (not that I’m complaining), a group of DeepMind alumni quietly asked: “But what about Excel?” Enter [Fundamental](https://fundamental.tech/) and their brainchild **NEXUS** — the world’s first Large Tabular Model that emerged from stealth on February 5th, 2026 with a staggering [$255 million in funding](https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260205966141/en/Fundamental-Announces-255M-in-Funding-and-Publicly-Launches-its-Most-Powerful-Large-Tabular-Model-LTM) at a $1.2 billion valuation.
Here’s the delicious irony: the most valuable data in the world lives in rows and columns — CRMs, databases, financial ledgers — yet traditional LLMs treat numbers like scattered alphabet soup. NEXUS flips the script entirely. Built on a non-Transformer architecture, this deterministic powerhouse was pre-trained on billions of real-world tables and understands that column order shouldn’t matter when predicting diabetes risk or customer churn.
The magic? One line of code. No armies of data scientists. No months of feature engineering. Just raw tables flowing into predictions like water. And thanks to their [strategic AWS partnership](https://longbridge.com/en/news/274996179), you can deploy it straight from your AWS console using existing credits — enterprise procurement finally made painless.
Before they even said “hello” to the world, Fundamental had already locked down seven-figure contracts with Fortune 100 companies. When a stealth startup launches with unicorn status and major enterprise backing from Oak HC/FT, Salesforce Ventures, and Battery Ventures, you know they’re onto something big.
So while the LLM crowd chases the next token, NEXUS is quietly becoming the foundational model for the forgotten giant of enterprise data: the humble spreadsheet. Sometimes the most revolutionary ideas aren’t about creating new worlds — they’re about finally understanding the ones we’ve already built.
Check out the full story at [fundamental.tech/news/launch](https://fundamental.tech/news/launch) and welcome to the era of the Large Tabular Model.
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