Fundamental raises $275M for a foundation model for tabular data and is using the World Cup to benchmark it against sports books

Fundamental is building what Jeremy Fraenkel describes as the missing piece of the AI stack: a foundation model for structured and tabular data. While LLMs handle text, audio, and video well, the rows and columns that actually run enterprise operations — spreadsheets, databases, CRMs — never had a comparable breakthrough. Fundamental's model, Nexus, is pretrained on billions of tables to generalize across industries and use cases, letting companies make better predictions from their existing structured data.

The company has raised $275M from Oak, Valor, Battery Ventures, and Salesforce, with angel backing from Aravind Srinivas (Perplexity) and Assaf Rappaport (Wiz).

“We raised $275,000,000. Fundamental built a foundation model for tabular data — what we're doing for tables is what ChatGPT did for language. We pretrained the model on billions of tables. Before the 2022 World Cup, our model predicted Argentina would win way before bookmakers did. For 2026, we heavily favor Spain over France — the betting markets have them neck and neck.”

World Cup benchmark

To validate Nexus publicly, Fundamental is using the 2026 World Cup as a live benchmark against sports books. The methodology: train the model on historical international match data through 2022, run more than 20,000 simulations, and compare predictions against betting market odds. In the retrospective test on the 2022 tournament, Nexus identified Argentina as the eventual winner well before bookmakers did — while markets had Brazil as frontrunner through the quarterfinals.

For 2026, Fundamental's predictions already diverge from the market. Fraenkel says the model heavily favors Spain over France, which betting markets currently rate as neck-and-neck, and places Argentina as a strong runner-up rather than the fifth-place contender the market implies. The US sits at 0.5% to win. Belgium, for those keeping score, is under 2%.

The predictions are live at soccer.fundamental.tech.

The World Cup framing is smart positioning. Fraenkel concedes the core business is enterprise, not consumer — but a public, time-stamped record of outperforming liquid prediction markets is a more credible proof point than a white paper. If Spain wins, Fundamental has a benchmark result that is very difficult to argue with.