Ask-AI: $11 Million Closed To Advance Generative AI Answers And Insights Solution For Enterprises

By Dan Anderson ● Jan 12, 2024

Ask-AI – a generative AI answers and insights solution for enterprises – recently announced the launch of its new Generative AI Sidekick, along with $11 million in Series A funding. Leaders Fund led the funding round with participation from seed investors Vertex Ventures, State of Mind Ventures, GTMFund, and others. The investment brings Ask-AI to $20 million in funding.

Companies are storing data in multiple platforms and siloes: Slack, emails, CRMs, business documents, customer interactions, knowledge bases and more. And getting all the relevant data when deciding or interacting with a customer is nearly impossible. Generative AI could help, but companies struggle to build solutions that work accurately, are widely adopted, and positively impact the business.

Ask-AI is a comprehensive generative AI solution designed from scratch to enhance efficiency in repetitive tasks, knowledge management, and understanding the voice of the customer. And connecting to over 50 enterprise work systems such as Salesforce, Zendesk, Confluence, Jira, Slack, Google Drive, Teams, and many other customer communication and knowledge sources, Ask-AI ingests, analyzes and understands enterprise knowledge. Plus, it integrates that knowledge into an employee’s workflow to help them be more productive, providing multiple use cases for customer support, success, product, R&D, and sales.

“ASK” is Ask-AI’s always-on “sidekick” sidebar, giving contextual information about anything in a team member’s workflow. And when looking at a customer ticket, ASK might show a generative AI highlight of the customer’s long-term concerns and past interactions, insights about sentiment and churn risk, and suggest concise answers and relevant knowledge across all company sources. It also gives a confidence score and linked citation for its generated content to combat AI hallucination, something popular AI models have struggled to do.

Completing the end-to-end solution, MosAIc is an AI insights solution that creates visual maps of key customer concerns, issues, and repeating questions based on information from across the business. And MosAIc helps organizational leaders hear the customer’s voice and identify trends to close knowledge gaps.

Through Ask-AI, the company’s customers – which include Monday.com, CallRail, Yotpo, HiBob, Own, Instawork, and dozens more – have achieved substantial improvements on key business metrics, including reducing the Time-to-resolution of an average support ticket by 20%, cutting the average number of tickets per agent per day by 25%, and Slack channel use 18%.

Ask-AI was founded by Alon Talmor, whose previous AI company, BlueTail, was acquired by Salesforce. While at Salesforce, he was appointed as a Chief Data Scientist. And with a Ph.D. in natural language processing, Talmor has built a world-class AI product team, including Prof. Jonathan Berant, who leads NLP research at Tel Aviv University; Josh Solomon, former Head of Global Sales at Ada, Dafna Lavran, former VP and Chief of Staff at Payoneer; and Eyal Medar, who has extensive experience as a VP of R&D in startups.

Currently a team of 40 people across Tel Aviv and Toronto, Ask-AI plans to double over the next year.

KEY QUOTES:

“Executive teams are excited about the promise of AI, and want to take advantage of the technology to make their employees more productive and their customers more satisfied. But they quickly realize that building AI into their workforce systems is more difficult than expected. What they really want is an out-of-the-box application that doesn’t rely on employees asking the right questions. It should tell employees what they need to know – answers, insights and actions – before they know what they need.”

— Alon Talmor, founder and CEO of Ask-AI

“We surveyed the market and saw that many solutions were trying to bolt gen AI onto their legacy solutions, leading to limited capabilities and data accuracy issues. Other companies were presenting slideware; Ask-AI is delivering useful Gen AI solutions today that are deeply ingrained with our employee workflows, highly accurate, and constantly delivering valuable insights.”

— Said Gadi Vered, Senior Vice President Customer Support and Implementation at Own

“Enterprises want to use Gen AI to access and act on the knowledge that resides within their siloed systems. Ask-AI is the only native Gen AI platform with live enterprise-wide deployments in world-leading companies. The platform enables employees to get answers from enterprise data and take smart actions to complete their work faster. We are excited with the amount of demand Ask is seeing from the market and the value their customers are already realizing. We think it will be a winner in this category.”

— David Stein, Managing Partner at Leaders Fund