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Intently, an enterprise AI startup, has introduced the launch of Founder AI, a brand new product that makes use of synthetic intelligence to assist startup founders determine related buyers and heat introductions inside their current networks. The instrument analyzes a founder’s Gmail account and LinkedIn connections to floor essentially the most promising paths to VCs and angels, automating one of the vital time-consuming and opaque elements of the fundraising course of.
The corporate additionally introduced that it has raised $3 million in seed funding from Y Combinator, Insurgent Fund, Pioneer Fund, Liquid2, Altair Capital and Davidovs VC to gas the event and launch of Founder AI.
“The big picture here is that obviously Slava and Dmitry built an amazing company in the past, but all of us are experienced entrepreneurs,” mentioned Mika Melchanka, co-founder of Intently. “Every business we launched, we realize the importance of building a meaningful network.”
Harnessing AI to map skilled networks
Melchanka emphasised that Founder AI isn’t just one other CRM or outreach instrument, however a extra focused resolution. “The purpose that Founder AI is actually serving is to help you leverage your network that you have, for very specific use cases that you stumble upon when you’re doing business as a founder, as a startup founder. And we start actually with the first use case, which is fundraising.”
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Founder AI combines two key AI applied sciences — massive language fashions (LLMs) and graph neural networks (GNN) — to parse founders’ electronic mail and social networking knowledge, determine related buyers and advocate the perfect path to a heat intro. “LLM already possess vast amounts of data… which is pretty much unstructured and parsed from various sources such as social media, news articles, blogs and more,” defined Dmitry Starodubtsev, Intently co-founder and CTO, in an interview with VentureBeat. “But the problem of LLM is that they usually lack interaction between different pieces of information.”
That’s the place Intently’s proprietary graph neural networks are available in. “GNN, or graph neural network, leverages understanding and precisely models relationship and interaction in data in a more structured way,” mentioned Starodubtsev. “GNN leverages message passing between nodes, which are individuals in our system or companies, and edges, which are relationships between them.”
Seasoned founders deal with networking challenges
The Intently staff brings deep experience in enterprise AI in addition to the fundraising challenges founders face. CEO Slava Solonitsyn and Starodubtsev beforehand cofounded Mighty Buildings, a prefab sustainable dwelling development startup that raised greater than $100 million. That have gave them firsthand information of how essential a founder’s community is, and the way a lot time networking and fundraising can eat.
“There is something that is not fixed yet, especially during the AI era that started last year with all the cold outreach, with all these automated messages, tools that can call you, send a message,” mentioned Melchanka. “The actual real connection is fading out.”
Solonitsyn believes there’s a chance to carry extra AI automation and intelligence to enterprise networking generally, not simply fundraising. “Founders are not as much different from other categories of professionals who suffer from the networking burden as well, right? Especially in a world where the same AI created these personalized spam…They’re just another level of spam.”
Centered launch concentrating on fundraising, with enlargement deliberate
However the Intently staff needed to start out with the use case they knew finest from their very own expertise. Additionally they emphasised their dedication to knowledge privateness and safety, noting that Founder AI is licensed by Google and solely analyzes electronic mail metadata, not the content material of messages themselves.
Founder AI will launch subsequent week in a restricted launch to a choose group of founders. The corporate plans to step by step broaden entry and roll out extra options to automate different frequent networking use instances for founders, like enterprise improvement and hiring. Whereas beginning with a slender use case, Intently’s imaginative and prescient is to develop into a necessary AI-powered networking agent for professionals in all fields.
“The agents that we develop are automated, and they solve a very particular business challenge,” mentioned Melchanka. “When it comes to, for example, business development, there is certain industry knowledge from doing startups for a while that you can get meaningful introductory paths to enterprise level companies, if you understand who’s doing partnerships with them.”
In a world the place “it’s not what you know, it’s who you know,” Intently goals to degree the enjoying discipline by making the proper connections simply an AI question away. With the launch of Founder AI, the startup is taking step one in direction of a future the place clever brokers can deal with the heavy lifting of networking, releasing founders to give attention to what they do finest — constructing the following massive factor.
