Mark Gilbert (a former Twilio, Microsoft and Hearsay executive and product leader) and his co-founder Akos Ratku (a former engineering leader from Hearsay) launched Zocks, a privacy first AI platform that analyzes conversations with customers to capture key information, create better records, and accelerate their workflows. And the company’s first vertical focus is on the financial services industry, where a large amount of unproductive time is spent on administrative tasks.
The company also announced $5.5 million in seed financing led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from Ascend Ventures, and Global Founders Capital and angel investors including George Hu (ex-COO of Twilio and Salesforce), Sheila Jambekar (ex-Chief Privacy Officer at Plaid), Jeremy Hermann (Co-founder of Delphina, Tecton, ex Uber AI lead) and Marc Boroditsky (President Revenue Cloudflare). Following a successful closed-beta with over 100 design partners, Zocks is now generally available with its first release focused on the financial services industry.
Zocks believes that AI tuned for specific use cases (paired with industry specific workflows and safety controls) are a winning combination. And many industries still use pen and paper, or clunky technology tools that transcribe conversations. Even when successful, the models require a large amount of data entry into back office systems, something Zocks is designed to reduce and ultimately remove.
Financial services is just one industry spending an inordinate amount of time manually writing down notes and typing data into systems after talking with clients. However, the considerable time spent and accompanying mental load dedicated to this, it’s not uncommon to have missing data and follow ups delayed by days or weeks.
Zocks features include:
- Zocks conversational building blocks for financial services that automatically captures the important information needed for financial professionals.
- Zocks in-person and virtual meeting connector that securely monitors virtual or in-person client meetings for capturing the critical information.
- Zocks follow up generator – which automatically generates follow up emails for the advisor based on the structure and style of their client communications.
- All built on Zocks’ Safe AI platform that gives customers full control of their data and it has the needed safeguards to protect client information and privacy.
Along with Gilbert and Ratku, Zocks was built by a group of technologists who have worked together for many years and have software used by some of the largest financial companies.
KEY QUOTES:
“Zocks is addressing a huge gap when it comes to productivity. Pairing industry specific use cases and workflows with AI is the key to unlocking productivity and helping companies scale. It will save companies millions of dollars a year. With Zocks, key information is automatically captured, which then triggers AI-driven back office workflows. It’s like having an expert in the room that lets you focus on your clients.”
- Arif Janmohamed, Partner at Lightspeed
“When we started Zocks, we talked with hundreds of people about where they were spending their time and what work they liked the least. We quickly became laser focused on using AI to boost productivity and help busy professionals focus on the work they love doing, by removing the work they dislike. Almost every large industry has these same patterns, we started with financial services because of the opportunity to make a step function change in productivity.”
- Mark Gilbert
“I no longer have to worry about taking notes or missing some of the details when talking with clients. I can put my complete focus on clients. … Better info for me, better planning for the clients and a detailed record for compliance. Win Win Win.”
- Geoff Kanner, Kanner Financial Services
