Plasticity

What Plasticity does

Plasticity is a natural language processing (NLP) technology company founded in 2016 in San Francisco by Ajay Patel and Alex Sands. Its product portfolio centers on three cloud-hosted and on-premise APIs: Sapien Language Engine (low-level NLP tasks including named entity recognition, syntax dependency parsing, part-of-speech tagging, lemmatization, tokenization, spelling correction, coreference resolution, sentiment analysis, and open information extraction), Cortex Knowledge Graph (240+ million facts across 20+ million real-world entities, queryable in natural language, with weekly data refreshes and an option for custom document corpora), and Lingua Dialogue Engine (conversational interfaces with intent parsing, slot filling, and multi-turn dialogue management). The stack is built in C++ for throughput, claimed at 6,000 sentences per second. Plasticity also maintains the Disinformation Toolkit for government analysts and several open-source libraries (Magnitude, SuperSQLite, Coldbrew, and an official Python SDK).

Plasticity operates an API-first, usage-based go-to-market: developers start on a free tier per API and pay a cost-per-thousand-requests rate once usage caps are exceeded, with monthly billing, and corporate accounts can be linked to the AWS Marketplace. Enterprise and government customers are reached through a direct sales motion for on-premise deployments and custom integrations, billed under a separate statement of work that includes implementation, configuration, training, and advisory professional services. Customer segments span government and defense (intelligence, disinformation detection), commercial companies across technology, law, and medicine, and individual developers integrating NLP into applications.

Following a 2017 Y Combinator batch and a 2018 National Science Foundation SBIR award (the largest disclosed funding event at $224,679), Plasticity was acquired in October 2020 by Executive 1 Holding Company (EX1), a private AI/SaaS-focused holding company, and has since operated as a wholly owned subsidiary alongside EX1's HumanTouch LLC and CORASCloud Inc. The company's headquarters is now in McLean, Virginia. In March–April 2021, Plasticity disabled new public API signups and ended access for existing free apps, tightening the model toward enterprise and government contracts. Disclosed customers include the Wall Street Journal (social media sentiment analysis for political campaign coverage) and unnamed government agencies; total disclosed customers are described as "hundreds of organizations and thousands of developers" since 2016.

Name

Plasticity

Legal name

Plasticity Inc.

Website

https://plasticity.ai

Company type

Private

Founded year

2016

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

1–10 employees

Short description

Plasticity provides natural language processing APIs — Sapien for NLP tasks, Cortex Knowledge Graph for entity queries, and Lingua Dialogue Engine for conversational interfaces — serving government agencies and commercial customers in technology, law, and medicine since 2016.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Natural Language Processing APIs

NAICS

Software Publishers (5132)

SIC

Services-Prepackaged Software (7372)

akta.pro industry

PRIMARYHDAAADAC

Question Answering & Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG)

Hardware, Technology & Telecom/Artificial Intelligence & Machine Learning/Natural Language Processing (NLP)

Keywords

• Natural language processing
• NLP APIs
• Text analytics
• Conversational AI
• Knowledge graph

Headquarters

HQ city

Mclean

HQ country

United States

HQ region

North America

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Technology or R&D, Personnel, Operations, Marketing or Sales, Infrastructure

Revenue model

1. API Access Subscriptions: Developer API access with free tier and paid tiers based on usage. Cloud-hosted APIs charged per thousand requests (CPM). Monthly billing based on number of requests made.
2. On-premise Deployment: Enterprise on-premise API deployments for organizations requiring private cloud hosting. Custom pricing based on core licenses and configuration.
3. Usage-based API Billing: Monthly billing based on number of API requests made. Free tier available for each service. Paid tiers trigger once free tier caps are exceeded. All requests billed at same CPM rate per tier.
4. Professional Services: Implementation, configuration, integration, software consulting, development, training, and advisory professional services provided under separate statement of work.

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion1 record

Distribution channels3 records

Marketing channels4 records

Core offering

Plasticity provides cloud-hosted and on-premise natural language processing APIs that allow developers, government agencies, and commercial customers to extract entities, relationships, and context from unstructured text, query a large knowledge graph of real-world facts, and build conversational interfaces. The core product suite comprises Sapien Language Engine (NLP tasks), Cortex Knowledge Graph (knowledge retrieval), and Lingua Dialogue Engine (conversational AI), delivered as JSON-based REST APIs with a Python SDK.

Product overview

Plasticity provides a suite of natural language processing products delivered as cloud-hosted or on-premise APIs. The core portfolio consists of three API products: Sapien Language Engine (low-level NLP tasks including NER, POS tagging, lemmatization, dependency parsing, coreference resolution, sentiment analysis, and open information extraction), Cortex Knowledge Graph (natural language queryable knowledge base of 240+ million real-world facts across 20+ million entities, plus custom document querying), and Lingua Dialogue Engine (intent classification, slot filling, and multi-turn conversation management for chatbots — currently in beta). These three APIs are available individually or bundled, with optional on-premise deployment and a Disinformation Toolkit add-on for government customers. Additionally, Plasticity maintains four open-source libraries (Magnitude, SuperSQLite, Coldbrew, Plasticity Python) available on GitHub for the developer community.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• Sapien Language Engine Core natural language understanding API that extracts entities, relationships, context, intents, and metadata from unstructured text. Performs named entity recognition, syntax dependency parsing, part-of-speech tagging, lemmatization, tokenization, coreference resolution, sentiment analysis, and open information extraction. Written in C++ for 6,000 sentences/second throughput and tops benchmarks for open information extraction, coreference resolution, and slot filling. Target users: developers, government agencies, and commercial companies needing low-level NLP.
• Cortex Knowledge Graph Structured knowledge graph API providing access to 240+ million facts on 20+ million real-world entities (people, places, things). Supports natural language question answering, entity search, property search, category search, and compound/nested queries. Includes rich metadata (photos, descriptions, source identifiers) with weekly data source updates. Also offers an unstructured variant for querying custom documents in natural language. Target users: developers, government agencies, and commercial companies needing structured real-world knowledge.
• Lingua Dialogue Engine Conversational AI API providing intent classification, slot filling, and multi-turn dialogue management for chatbots and automated messaging. Handles complex queries including multi-part questions, negation, adjective-noun correlation, and follow-up requests with fewer training examples. Cloud-based training interface with paraphrase automation. Target users: developers and product teams building chatbots and conversational interfaces.
• Disinformation Toolkit
• Professional Services Implementation, configuration, integration, software consulting, development, training, and advisory services provided under separate statement of work. Target users: enterprise and government customers requiring custom deployments and integrations.

Named customers3 records

Segments3 records

Ideal customer profiles3 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

Yes

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration6 records

AI capability6 records

Feature5 records

Scale indicators5 records

Recent moves6 records

Expansion highlights6 records

Direct peers

• Microsoft Azure Text Analytics: Azure's NLP APIs for NER, sentiment, key phrase extraction, and language detection. Directly comparable API-first model with similar customer segments and integration points.
• MonkeyLearn: No-code and API-based text analysis platform for sentiment, entity extraction, and classification. Similar API-first, usage-based commercial NLP business model targeting the same enterprise and SMB customers.
• Primer: NLP company focused on government, intelligence, and defense use cases including disinformation and multi-document analysis. Closest comparable by customer segment (government/defense NLP) and mission overlap with Plasticity's Disinformation Toolkit.
• MeaningCloud: Cloud text analytics API offering sentiment, topic extraction, NER, and deep categorization. Directly comparable prepaid/usage-based API business model targeting commercial NLP customers.
• Amazon Comprehend: AWS's NLP service providing entity extraction, sentiment, syntax, topic modeling, and Comprehend Medical. Closely aligned business model (managed API, usage-based CPM-style pricing) and target customers, and benefits from AWS Marketplace billing the same channel Plasticity uses.

Broad incumbents

• Palantir Technologies: Data analytics platform heavily used by government/defense customers for unstructured text and intelligence workflows. Competes with Plasticity in the government NLP use case (intelligence, disinformation) at a vastly larger scale and contract size.
• IBM Watson Natural Language Understanding: Enterprise NLP API offering entity, sentiment, relation, and concept extraction. Overlaps with Sapien on core NLP tasks and competes for enterprise/government customers, with broader Watson platform capabilities.
• Google Cloud Natural Language AI: Google's managed NLP API offering entity analysis, sentiment, syntax, and classification. Directly comparable in offering (cloud NLP API, pay-per-request pricing) but with vastly greater scale, foundation-model integration, and enterprise reach.

Emerging players

• Indico Data: Unstructured data and NLP platform offering document classification, extraction, and workflow automation. Comparable in offering focus on enterprise NLP APIs and the same developer-friendly integration model.
• spaCy: Open-source industrial-strength NLP library providing NER, POS tagging, dependency parsing, and more. Plasticity's Sapien competes with spaCy's accuracy/performance, but spaCy is free and self-hosted, putting pressure on Plasticity's paid API value proposition.

Market position

Strengths4 records

Weaknesses4 records

Competitive moat4 records

Key risks6 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

• Xx.com/plasticityai
• GitHubgithub.com/plasticityai
• Facebookfacebook.com/plasticityai
• Instagraminstagram.com/plasticityai
• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/plasticityai

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles2 records

Funding overview

Funding rounds3 records

Investors6 records

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Plasticity