Ask-AI closes substantial seed funding round to bring its AI-NLP platform, which surfaces direct Google-style answers and recurring questions from all of an organization’s sources and customer communications, to enterprises
Ask-AI, an NLP powered direct answer and insight surfacing platform, has completed a $9 million seed round led by Vertex Ventures and State of Mind Ventures, with additional participation from a series of private investors and VCs, including, Web Summit, Simon Chan’s of Firsthand Fund, GTMFund, Interplay Ventures, Geffen Capital, AGP, Guidestar, Ran Sarig and Efi Cohen (Founders of Datorama), Barak Goldstein and Yakir Daniel, who both sold five companies as entrepreneurs, and others.
Ask-AI’s platform allows managers and employees to receive answers and insights from all internal knowledge and customer communication sources. Current methods for receiving answers and insights are manual and time-consuming for entire organizations and Customer Experience teams in particular. Ask-AI improves this inefficient process by giving users pinpointed answers to questions instead of document links, in a way similar to Google Answers. and instead of document links.
Ask-AI technology combines state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) with a deep understanding of questions and human discourse and the ability to automatically analyze long texts and summarize them in one clear sentence. Additionally, the system identifies recurring questions and problems and makes it possible to receive business, process, and product answers and insights from all the organization’s information sources, including Slack, emails, chats, databases, monitored calls of call centers, and more, to improve customer experience, organizational knowledge, employee efficiency, and provides a complete view of the “voice of the customer.” The system uses questions for which it cannot find answers to learn, improve and help drive knowledge creation, effectively becoming the central organizational Knowledge Base.
Ask-AI was founded at the end of 2021 by Dr. Alon Talmor, who serves as CEO. Talmor, a graduate of the 8200 unit in the Israeli Defense Forces, previously founded the startup BlueTail, which was sold to Salesforce.com, and later became a Chief Data Scientist at Salesforce. He then earned a Ph.D. in AI, focusing on question-answering and NLP.
Ask’s team also includes Prof. Jonathan Berant, who leads NLP research at Tel Aviv University; Dafna Lavran, former VP and Chief of Staff at Pioneer; and Eyal Medar, who has extensive experience as a VP of R&D in startups. The company currently operates in a SaaS model and counts Ownbackup, Yotpo, Armis, Coralogix, Claroty, WalkMe, and others as its customers and design partners.
Alon Talmor, founder and CEO of Ask-AI: “Companies today find themselves awash in information and data from many internal and external sources and a multitude of text-heavy communication channels. Employees spend extensive amounts of time searching for knowledge and summarizing and tagging customer communications. Our platform aims to mimic Google’s success in making answers from the web directly available but in the corporate world.”
Yanai Oron, Managing Partner at Vertex Ventures: “We were surprised to see how many organizations face the same challenges of having a multitude of knowledge silos and the difficulty in updating and searching them, and how Ask-AI’s approach is a simple and effective solution that solves those challenges. One of our larger portfolio companies is a design partner and paying customer of Ask and has expanded the use of the product to many dozens of users even before the product was officially launched.”
“With the exponential growth of information sources and internal and external organizational communication channels, an enormous gap has arisen within the current solutions for business intelligence. This issue is especially prevalent in the lack of companies’ abilities to analyze unstructured text written in various channels such as chat, Slack, etc. Today, managers, customer service, and product personnel don’t have proper access to complete and effective information and lack the tools necessary to provide efficient service to their customers in this area. I believe that Ask-AI’s groundbreaking technology, combined with their experienced team, will allow the company to lead in this newly created category,” said Merav Rotem Naaman, Managing Partner at State of Mind Ventures. “Ask’s solutions will ensure that no one in the entire chain of the organization misses any important information.”
Credit: Ask-AI
