Our Investment in Ask-AI - The GenAI Enterprise Sidekick

Today we are announcing that Leaders Fund has led an $11M financing in Ask-AI, the Generative AI sidekick built for enterprises, with participation from existing investors Vertex Ventures, State of Mind Ventures and GTMFund. This brings the total funds raised to $20M.

We see three key trends that underpin this investment:

1) The arrival of GenAI as a viable capability that companies want to exploit.

2) The need for proprietary engines that optimize and enrich LLM inputs and outputs.

3) Recognition of the need to adopt whole product GenAI vs. building from scratch.

In 2023, the potential of Generative AI to transform how we work was demonstrated through ChatGPT and other LLMs, and we witnessed a breakthrough moment in general awareness and conviction. While we saw incredible prototypes and concepts, these experiments illustrated the gap between a GenAI prototype and an application that is ‘enterprise ready’. Companies, regardless of the industry in which they operate, were sufficiently excited to start exploring, understanding and utilizing GenAI to become more efficient and improve their customers’ experiences.

Although billions of investment dollars flowed into the early LLM pioneers, product builders came to realize that the foundational LLM capabilities can’t automatically solve any business problem. Connecting company databases to ChatGPT alone doesn’t work. As a first step, an AI engine sitting on top of these LLMs is required for pre and post processing to properly prepare LLMs to translate user requests into optimized inputs and accurate outputs. The complexities and capabilities of this engine must also be abstracted from users. Without this engine, it becomes challenging to deliver the specific GenAI features required for reliable adoption. 

The bar for enterprise adoption is high when it comes to any product, but especially those relying on GenAI to support and recommend business decisions, both large and small. As companies ran initial experiments aimed at augmenting customer service or surfacing and summarizing the right company data, they saw the nuances and challenges of building robust and reliable applications. Beyond the actual features, enterprise ready applications also need security, configurability, UX and deep integrations to be successful. After gaining some fluency with GenAI, the majority of companies we surveyed indicated a preference to purchase and deploy a purpose built solution vs. building from scratch. They would rather have a configurable, proven solution that moves the needle on their business immediately.

With market appetite to adopt, rapidly shifting recognition of the need to purchase GenAI applications vs build them, we were incredibly excited to meet Alon Talmor and see the Ask AI platform. They have built the engine, the configurable platform and specific features to give employees superpowers. For example, their customer support solution provides summaries of tickets and customer sentiment, relevant content and suggested resolutions, all embedded in the existing user workflows. Already, Ask-AI customers are seeing team throughput increase by 50% while increasing customer satisfaction.

With 50+ out-of-the-box integrations already available (including Salesforce, Zendesk, Slack, Confluence, Jira, Slack, Google Drive, Teams, customers such as Monday.com, Yotpo, Own and CallRail are quickly moving from department rollouts to company wide deployments. Ask-AI is the only native GenAI platform with live enterprise-wide deployments in world-leading companies

This early success comes from the expertise of company founder Alon Talmor, and the experienced leadership team of Jonathan Berant, Dafna Levran, Eyal Madar and Josh Soloman.

We expect Ask-AI to capitalize on the growing demand for GenAI solutions based on their team, solution and transformational success of their customers.