Because the total of ventures decreases 12 months by 12 months key markets equivalent to the United StatesAND apprehension that enterprise capital firms themselves are struggling to raise more capital, founders could also be anxious. After all, if private market investment does not pick up in the coming quarters, we could expect one other 12 months of declines in total startup investment in 2024.
Some startups are working to counter the slowdown, including Intently, which is rolling out a recent service this week called Founder of AI. The premise of the service is easy: it would analyze your personal information, understand who you know, sort those connections based on their very own background in terms of what they’ve built, and create a few advisable paths to introduce investors from the founders’ existing network.
The goal is to find out the best ways to achieve the best suited investors because most individuals won’t offer you much of an introduction. So you must make sure you are targeting targets which may come in handy.
Under the hood, the service is a bit more complex; so much so that Intent CEO and co-founder Slava Solonitsyn told TechCrunch that his team built founders’ AI as a service company first to make sure they understood what founders had, needed and wanted, and only then to have the ability to provide that work with AI.
Not just AI pixie dust, mind. The Intently team’s recent service uses vector searches to find out relevancy, which my understanding of vectors – which is admittedly only lukewarm – makes sense. But it won’t attempt to vectorize all the pieces. During the development process, Solonitsyn and co-founders Dmitry Starodubtsev and Mika Melchanka needed to narrow down what they were doing to make sure they were using vectors that were meaningful, because just using all possible data points could be too expensive.
The company indicated that it has only raised single-digit hundreds of thousands so far, including a $3.3 million round last spring. The startup is seeking to raise more capital, perhaps in the $5 million to $10 million range. Of course, how well Founder AI performs once it gets into the hands of founders will help determine how much capital Intently can raise.
He has broader plans for the service; fundraising is not the ultimate goal of his work. Instead, the startup will transfer its technology to recent areas of labor over time, equivalent to business development. Considering the size of the sales tools market, this is not an idea that might be a huge shock. However, having software that intelligently reads your calls and helps you make communication decisions can actually help you communicate completely digitally by stopping wasted messages. It could be a victory for everyone.
Intently is a Y Combinator-backed company, which suggests it could see early interest in Founder AI among its accelerators. We’ll keep checking to see if the recent service becomes something founders need to use and pay for. The company intends to charge $99 monthly for the tool, or more if a customer wants to make use of more data sources when searching for connections. This seems reasonable; the more data the customer wants to make use of, the higher the computation costs. So the higher the price. In summary, if Intently works, could we see total enterprise activity in the market? Normal? Talk about putting AI to good use from a startup perspective.