OpenAI leads $23.5M spherical in Mem, an AI-powered note-taking app • TechCrunch

Final yr, OpenAI introduced the OpenAI Startup Fund, a tranche via which it and its companions, together with Microsoft, are investing in early-stage AI corporations tackling main issues. Mum’s been the phrase since on which corporations have acquired infusions from the Fund. However immediately, the OpenAI Startup Fund revealed that it led a $23.5 million funding in Mem, a work-focused app that faucets AI to routinely set up notes.

The funding values Mem at $110 million post-money and brings the startup’s whole raised to $29 million.

Co-founded by Kevin Moody and Dennis Xu, Mem differentiates itself from conventional note-taking apps by emphasizing “light-weight group,” in Moody and Xu’s phrases. The workflow revolves round search and a chronological timeline, permitting customers to connect matter tags, tag different customers and add recurring reminders to notes.

Mem customers can seize fast notes, ship hyperlinks and save photographs from wherever utilizing SMS, messaging apps and the platform’s cellular consumer. Collaboration options let groups share, edit and touch upon notes and instantly connect them to shared calendars for sooner reference.

Mem’s search expertise makes use of AI to go looking throughout notes, aiming to know which notes is likely to be most related in a given second to a selected particular person. Moody and Xu say the platform is designed to enhance information employees of their typical duties, like studying via pages of data, extracting the items related to a selected query and reworking the knowledge into a solution or a report.

There’s little doubt knowledge-seeking duties are time-consuming. In keeping with Gartner, professionals spend 50% of their working hours trying to find info and on common take 18 minutes to find a file (albeit the veracity of metrics like these has been challenged over time). One supply estimates that doc disorganization prices companies $3,900 per worker annually in productiveness losses, making Mem a beautiful proposition if the tech works as marketed.

“The primary factor we hear from the organizations we speak to is the will to have the ability to marry their huge troves of proprietary information with … generative AI fashions — to assist use circumstances that vary from conducting analysis to writing to promoting and past,” Moody and Xu informed TechCrunch in an electronic mail interview. “The magic of Mem is that we convey collectively your individual non-public and proprietary knowledge together with state-of-the-art generative language fashions to unlock actually customized, factual outputs. We mix information sources throughout the person, staff and organizational ranges, resulting in considerably higher efficiency throughout the board.”

Mem just lately launched Mem It for Twitter, which permits customers to avoid wasting threads, get AI-generated summaries of their contents and see recommendations for related tweets. It’s additionally persevering with to refine Mem X, Mem’s built-in work assistant, with new options like Sensible Write and Sensible Edit, which leverages AI to generate textual content based mostly on a immediate, summarize information, generate titles for paperwork and let customers use pure language instructions to edit or format textual content.

Picture Credit: Mem

The plan for the foreseeable future is to more and more lean into these types of AI-powered experiences, Moody and Xu say, with assist from OpenAI via the OpenAI Startup Fund. OpenAI Startup Fund individuals obtain early entry to new OpenAI programs and Azure sources from Microsoft along with capital.

“OpenAI is clearly main the wave of technological revolutions that we’re driving,” Moody and Xu mentioned. “This makes the OpenAI Startup Fund the best associate for what we’re constructing — for each the technical experience and strategic steering they convey to the desk.”

Mem competes with a lot of corporations looking for to sort out the identical knowledge-finding and notes-organizing challenges. In enterprise search, there’s Glean, which just lately raised $100 million in a enterprise fairness spherical. On the information administration facet, Atlassian’s wiki-like collaborative workspace Confluence and Notion, which was valued at $2 billion in 2020, nonetheless dominate.

However Moody and Xu argue that 16-employee Mem has a bonus in that it’s “self-organizing,” ostensibly leading to much less guide curation and labor. Whereas they declined to disclose Mem’s income or the names of any main clients, they assert that Mem is profitable, owing to its AI-driven tech.

“We’re assured in our distinctive strategy to self-organizing and generative information administration. … Our customized machine studying fashions not solely assist information employees keep organized routinely, but in addition transcend merely serving to discover issues — we really assist individuals do their work,” Moody and Xu mentioned. “The shift to distant work has made efficient, asynchronous information sharing extra necessary than ever, and the market slowdown has precipitated corporations to deal with effectivity. Our AI-assisted information work saves individuals time, and the fast enchancment in giant language fashions provides us an extra tailwind.”