Enterprise

Weka announces $135M investment on $750M valuation to change how companies move data • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in data, Enterprise, machine learning, storage, WekaNo Comments

If there’s one thing that gets the attention of investors, even in uncertain times like these, it’s data efficiency. Data is the fuel for machine learning models and getting it from point A to point B can be expensive and time consuming. That’s why a startup that can help make that process move faster with less friction is probably going to be valuable. Such is the case with Weka, a company that has come up with a way to virtualize data to make it easier to move between sources without having to make a copy first. Today, the company announced a $135 million Series D investment on a $750 million valuation, big numbers in today’s conservative funding environment. CEO and co-founder Liran Zvibel says the company originally focused on increasing data throughput for high performance computing scenarios. “The initial focus was high performance computing environments. And that’s really where the first phase of the company started. But increasingly, over the last two or three years, people have been taking concepts from high performance computing, scientific computing and applying them in a commercial context, trying to build large enterprise workloads,” Zvibel told ZebethMedia. He says that although network and compute have sped up, especially with the increased use of GPUs to help power data-intensive workloads, storage has remained a legacy bottleneck, and that’s the weak link his company is trying to attack. “Most people have made the leap to GPUs, and they made the leap to fast networking, but they’re trying to underpin it with storage technology and storage architectures from the 1990s,” he said. He claims to have invented an entirely new way of moving data. “We’ve invented a whole set of new algorithms, data structures, control structures, even network protocols. We’re not leveraging TCP/IP. We have a network protocol that allows you to leverage RDMA zero copy-like performance even on a public cloud,” he said. “And we sat down, we implemented all of that new new kind of computer science theory. And now we can actually show customers the huge advantages they can get with this new approach.” He admits the technology in some ways sounds like it’s science fiction, so companies often start small to prove it works, and once they do they sign much bigger deals. “When we come in and we tell the story, it sounds like a fairy tale or a science fiction. So customers tend to start small. When they realize we’re actually doing what we say we do then then they really go into hyperdrive,” he said. The company offers their solution as a service, but sometimes it’s delivered on prem and increasingly in the cloud with 43% of transactions in Q3 coming from public cloud business. They currently have 300 employees and expect to double in the next 12-18 months. He says that hiring a diverse workforce is top of mind for the company. “At the end of the day, we’re hiring the best talent we can find because building that is the most important thing, but we are putting a lot of thought and effort on turning over every rock to make sure we are more and more diverse.” Today’s round of funding came from a large group that includes traditional VC firms, as well as many strategic investors. The list includes 10D, Atreides Management, Celesta Capital, Gemini Israel Ventures, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Hitachi Ventures, Key1 Capital, Lumir Ventures, Micron Ventures, Mirae Asset Capital, MoreTech Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, NVIDIA, Qualcomm Ventures and Samsung Catalyst. Today’s $750 million valuation doubles the previous valuation, according to the company. Weka has now raised over $293 million, per Crunchbase.

WeaveGrid gets $35M Series B to help electrical grid cope with coming wave of EVs • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in Climate, EC Enterprise Applications, EC Food Climate and Sustainability, electric vehicles, Enterprise, renewable energy, Startups, utilitiesNo Comments

Today, the electrical grid works because utilities have a time-tested playbook. They may not know exactly when you do your laundry, but they generally know washers and dryers run more in the evenings or on weekends. Air conditioners wind up when temperatures soar, and more lights click on during the dark winter months. But in the coming years, that playbook is going to go out the window. Renewables will reshape the grid, but EVs will present the real challenge. Utilities may know how many solar panels and wind turbines are hooked up, but what about how many EVs get plugged in every night? They might have a rough estimate at best. That’s where WeaveGrid comes in. The company’s enterprise SaaS serves as a platform integrating data from utilities, automakers, and drivers to help utilities manage the load that EVs place on the grid. This data will be increasingly important in the coming decade, when up to half of the U.S.’ 280 million vehicle fleet is predicted to become electrified. WeaveGrid hopes not only to help utilities plan for new generating capacity, it also wants to assist in identifying where they can most effectively upgrade their distribution infrastructure, which is going to need a significant overhaul. The average age of the grid’s power transformers, for example, is 25 years. “If 280 million vehicles all start charging around the same time at night, it’s going to create a lot of pressure on an aging infrastructure that’s really not ready to handle all of these giant batteries charging in a completely erratic manner,” said WeaveGrid CEO Apoorv Bhargava. To help coordinate millions of vehicles charging — and to ensure they’re ready when drivers need them — WeaveGrid’s platform pulls data from utilities, automakers and even smart EV chargers to build a picture of when and where the grid will need the most power. The company is announcing a $35 million Series B led by Salesforce Ventures, with participation from new investors Activate Capital, Emerson Collective, Collaborative Fund, and MCJ Collective. Existing investors Coatue, Breakthrough Energy Ventures, Grok Ventures, and The Westly Group also invested in the round. It’s Salesforce Ventures’ first time leading a climate tech investment.

With $18M in new funding, EngFlow wants to speed up your builds • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 15, 2022Posted in a16z, Bazel, EngFlow, Enterprise, funding, Gradle, StartupsNo Comments

Back in 2015, Google launched an open-source port of its internal automation tool for building and testing code. Dubbed Bazel (because the internal tool was called Blaze), the service uses a Python dialect to help developers write their rules and macros. Today, the tooling is used by companies ranging from Adobe to Databricks, Dropbox, LinkedIn and Redfin, so when the lead developer of Bazel at Google, Ulf Adams, and the lead of enterprise customer onboarding for Bazel at Google and co-creator of BazelCon, Helen Altshuler, raise new funding for their Bazel-centric startup EngFlow, it’s probably worth paying attention to. As the team announced today, EngFlow has raised an $18 million Series A round from Tiger Global, Firstminute Capital and Andreessen Horowitz, which also led the company’s $3.7 million seed round. Cockroach Labs CEO Spencer Kimball, Github co-founder Tom Preston-Werner and Snowflake CFO Mike Scarpelli, as well as Envoy creator Matt Klein and GitHub engineering VP Rachel Potvin also participated in this round. Image Credits: Bazel EngFlow describes itself as a “build acceleration company” that helps its enterprise customers more efficiently build and test their source code, with support for Bazel, Chromium and the Android Platform. “When we are talking about Bazel use at Google, an important factor is that Google has integrated Bazel with a lot of developer services,” Adams said. “So it’s not just the build tool, but you have remote execution, you have a user interface, you have coverage runners for analyzing coverage data from the tests, you have integration with deployment, all of that stuff. We’ve been talking to Bazel users for four years and they are looking for these things. Sometimes we say that Google is a snowflake, Google is special, but we often see that other companies want to want to do similar things. And so we thought there was an opportunity there.” Altshuler also stressed that increasingly, enterprises are creating platform engineering teams that aim to bring a more opinionated approach to CI/CD to their teams. “That is usually the audience for Bazel to try it to make it work for their specific company — and then launch it to the engineers. These platform engineering teams are our primary customers, but behind every platform engineering team, there are hundreds, thousands, maybe tens of thousands of engineers that are impacted by Bazel as a result and hopefully don’t have to be Bazel experts and know all of the internals — it should just work for them,” she noted. Image Credits: Bazel The team noted that a lot of new customers are migrating from Gradle or CMake to the service, so it’s maybe no surprise that EngFlow also recently hired Jay Conrod, the developer of the open-source Gazelle tool for migrating to Bazel (and also a former Googler). It’s worth stressing that while Bazel is a main focus here, the platform also supports Chromium and Android platform builds. Brave, with its Chromium-based browser, is a customer, for example. For Brave, EngFlow’s distributed build system brought build times down from two hours to fifteen minutes. But still, Bazel is the main focus here and the team today also launched its Bazel Invocation Analyzer, a new open-source tool that allows developers to get deeper insights into their Bazel profiles and optimize their builds. “Build is one of the most critical aspects of building software. And traditionally it’s been a massive time and cost sink for companies to get right,” said Martin Casado, General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “EngFlow is the leading company changing all of this. Coming from deep roots in Bazel and build, they’ve put together a solution which for the first time we’ve ever seen, is able to tackle the most complex code bases and large infrastructure environments and offer dramatic savings in development time and costs. These aren’t mere words, EngFlow has extraordinary customer traction across a number of verticals, far more than we normally see at this stage. We’re delighted to be investors and doubling down as EngFlow continues their path as the leading build company.” Given the popularity of taking Google open-source tools and bringing them to the enterprise (hello, Kubernetes), it’s maybe no surprise that EngFlow isn’t the only startup in this space. YC-backed BuildBuddy, for example, also offers a Bazel-centric build system. Meanwhile, well-funded Gradle Enterprise offers support for Gradle, Maven and Bazel as part of its enterprise build tool.

Meeting camera startup Owl Labs lands $25M and partnership with HP • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in Enterprise, funding, HP, Matrix Partners, playground global, Robotics & AI, Spark Capital, startup, StartupsNo Comments

Owl Labs, a startup developing a linuep AI-powered meeting hardware, today announced that it raised $25 million in a Series C round led by HP Tech Ventures (HP’s venture capital arm) with participation from Sourcenext, Matrix Partners, Spark Capital and Playground Global. The closing of the tranche marks the start of a strategic partnership with HP, Owl Labs CEO Frank Weishaupt says, which will see HP invest in Owl Labs’ various product offerings while providing sales coverage and outreach with enterprise customers. HP, notably, recently acquired Poly, which developed a range of video and voice devices and software for virtual conferencing. Weishaupt sees no conflict, arguing that Poly’s products are complementary with Owl Labs’ and show “HP’s commitment to transforming the workplace to a hybrid model.” “The funding will allow Owl Labs to continue its accelerated growth … Owl Labs will use the investment to support product development and increase global adoption of the company’s products, including the [Owl Labs’] product line,” Weishaupt told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “The funding will also be used to expand Owl Labs’ global footprint and deepen go-to-market partnerships starting with a commercial agreement between Owl Labs and HP France, where HP will sell Owl Labs’ products through their local sales team.” Owl Labs was founded by Mark Schnittman and Max Makeev in 2014, who sought to develop a better videoconferencing experience than cameras at the time could achieve. (Weishaupt, a former CarGurus exec, joined Owl Labs as CEO in early 2019.) Drawing on their work at iRobot, the Schnittman and Schnittman created Owl Labs’ first product, the auto-swiveling Meeting Owl Pro, after testing the concept by putting a laptop on a spinning stool. Today, Owl Labs sells several products, including a dedicated whiteboard camera, meeting room control console and its latest-generation meeting camera, the Meeting Owl 3. The Meeting Owl 3 features a mic and speaker array paired with a 360-degree camera, which zooms in on whoever’s speaking. There’s countless “intelligent” meeting cameras on the market, including from heavy hitters like Microsoft and Google. But Weishaupt makes the case that Owl Labs’ software is a differentiator. Called the Owl Intelligence System, it allows customers to connect up to two Meeting Owls to expand their video and audio range and add facial recognition including for masked faces. “Meeting Owl 3 is the only 360-degree videoconferencing device on the market that can be connected to others to expand reach in larger spaces,” Weishaupt said. ” Owl Labs’ technology learns the space to create a more seamless experience, getting smarter over time.” Owl Labs got caught in a negative press cycle earlier this year when a security firm, Modzero, uncovered vulnerabilities in several models of the Meeting Owl and whiteboard camera that attackers could’ve exploit to obtain sensitive data. Owl Labs patched the exploit, which doesn’t appear to have majorly dented sales — Weishaupt says that over 130,000 organizations are using Owl Labs products including 84 Fortune 100 companies. “We can share that we’ve had a solid growth trajectory with more than 3x revenue growth year-over-year and 7x revenue growth since the pandemic began,” Weishaupt said, declining to share more precise revenue figures. “Owl Labs became the first company to build AI-powered, 360-degree video conferencing solutions for hybrid organizations. Owl Labs as a company was hybrid pre-pandemic and are experts at using technology to bridge the gap between remote and in-person work environments.” To date, Boston-based, over-100-employee Owl Labs has raised $47 million in funding.

Real-time data startup Quix raises a $12.9M Series A round led by MMC Ventures • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 14, 2022Posted in big data, Enterprise, StartupsNo Comments

The complexity of streaming data technologies – not just streaming video but any kind of streaming data – has created a headache around dealing with that high speed data processing. Accordingly, companies like Spark, Flink have spring up to address this ksqlDB. Many are either either java-based solutions or SQL-based analytics solutions. However, UK startup Quix says it is a platform for developing event-driven applications with Python, which can have uses in, say, physics-based data modelling and anomaly detection in machine learning. It’s now raised a £11m / $12.9m Series A funding round led by London-based VC MMC Ventures, with participation from existing investors Project A Ventures (out of Berlin) and Passion Capital (London). The Quix founders are familiar with real-time decision-making, having worked in Formula 1, where success is based on milliseconds. In fact one of its customers is McLaren, as well as mobility startup Voi, and the National Health Service (UK), among others. In a statement, Mike Rosam, Co-Founder at Quix, said: “Many companies are struggling to combine raw technologies like Kafka into real-time data capabilities… This new capital will fuel our mission to simplify event-driven data engineering so that more companies can build modern data-intensive apps.” Oliver Richards, Partner at MMC Ventures, added: “We have been doing an increased amount of research in the data infrastructure space, it is clear that there is a growing demand for real-time streaming data, both across consumer and B2B use cases.”

Why not both? • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 12, 2022Posted in Enterprise, openview, pricing model, product-led growth, SaaS, Startups, The ExchangeNo Comments

Welcome to The ZebethMedia Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily ZebethMedia+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. The recent OpenView-Chargebee 2022 report had SaaS benchmarks as its focus, but also touched in passing on a topic I’ve been curious about: reverse trials, a pricing model that offers SaaS companies a middle ground between freemium and free trials. Let’s explore. — Anna A binary choice? As more SaaS companies adopt product-led growth (PLG), a sales method in which user conversions are driven by the product itself rather than a sales team, founders are often faced with a pricing model dilemma. If their startup opts for a freemium model, most users will never get a taste of the premium features reserved for paying users. But if the company offers a time-limited free trial, users who don’t become customers at the end of that period might be gone forever. There are many other pros and cons to freemium and free trials. As OpenView partner Kyle Poyar told me, “freemium models tend to drive more acquisition and more signups to your product, for example, while free trials have fewer signups but have a higher conversion rate from free to paid.” As a result, founders often think they are facing a binary choice, Poyar said. In an interview, Airtable head of growth Lauryn Isford told him that these two choices are often thought of as prioritizing user growth (with freemium) or revenue growth (with free trials.) Poyar, however, doesn’t think freemium versus free trials is the only alternative. For companies to “get the best of both worlds,” he and OpenView advocate for the reverse trial model, exemplified by Airtable. But what are reverse trials all about, and are they for everyone? Psychology 101

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy faces enormous challenges amid falling profits and negative numbers • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 11, 2022Posted in Adam Selipsky, Amazon, Andy Jassy, AWS, Commerce, EC Cloud and Enterprise Infrastructure, EC Ecommerce and D2C, EC News Analysis, Enterprise, jeff bezosNo Comments

Amazon CEO Andy Jassy is the definition of a company man. In an age when people switch jobs frequently, he has been at Amazon for 25 years, working his way up to president and CEO. But before he reached the corner office, he helped build Amazon Web Services, its cloud arm, into a $60 billion juggernaut. It wasn’t exactly a rise from the mailroom, but Jassy was there as founder Jeff Bezos’ aide-de-camp when they came up with the idea of AWS in the early 2000s at an executive offsite. He helped build it. He nurtured it. He made it into the crown jewel of the company. So when Bezos announced he was stepping down early last year, it didn’t take long for the organization to turn to Jassy, whose hard work at AWS and his deep understanding of company culture seemed to make him the perfect heir apparent. But things haven’t necessarily gone as planned since he took over the leadership role in July 2021. Much of what has happened has been out of his control. Like many chief executives, he inherited the problems left behind by his predecessor. During the pandemic, Amazon became the general store for the world. People stuck in lockdown turned to Amazon for their goods. The company’s revenues mushroomed and its workforce exploded, with the organization adding an astonishing 800,000 workers, mostly in its warehouses (per The Wall Street Journal). The future was bright, but as Jassy took over last year, people were heading out again. Suddenly, everyone wasn’t buying everything online anymore. As we headed into 2022, other macroeconomic factors began to affect commerce — online and brick-and-mortar — as inflation soared and consumers’ buying power began to diminish. Add to that the higher cost of energy and persistent supply chain issues, and Amazon was suddenly facing some challenges that were beginning to have a serious impact on earnings.

Thomson Reuters to acquire tax automation company SurePrep for $500M • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 11, 2022Posted in Enterprise, Fintech, Robotics & AI, SurePrep, thomson reutersNo Comments

Thomson Reuters has announced plans to acquire SurePrep, a tax automation software company based in Irvine, California. The transaction, which Thomson Reuters said it expects to close in Q1 2023, values SurePrep at $500 million, which will be paid entirely in cash. Founded in 2002, SurePrep is one of numerous software providers that help tax professionals and accountants gather and file 1040 tax returns on behalf of their clients. Integrating with existing tax software systems, SurePrep offers various products that support uploading documents at regular intervals through the year via automated document requests, with support for mobile scanning, esignatures, and more. Built-in AI smarts also automatically extracts and repopulates data in companies’ tax compliance software of choice, removing many of the manual paperwork steps involved. SurePrep’s TaxCaddy product SurePrep is the latest in a long recent line of tax management software companies to be acquired. In August, Vista Equity Partners announced plans to acquire automated tax compliance company Avalara for $8.4 billion, while earlier this month private equity firm Cinven revealed it was buying online tax preparation software provider TaxAct for $720 million. Last year, Stripe bought TaxJar for an undisclosed amount. Thomson Reuters, though perhaps best known for its news agency, has a number of business units including legal, government, and tax and accounting. Indeed, it has been partnering with SurePrep for the past six months, according to Thomson Reuters, “providing complementary solutions” for tax and accounting workers — this has effectively meant Thomson Reuters serving as a reseller for SurePrep’s software. For SurePrep, the deal will give it extensive reach into Thomson Reuters’ existing customer base, while for Thomson Reuters it gets an arsenal of automated tools to bolster its existing tax products.

SoftBank, NEC, Sony, Toyota + more team up for Rapidus, Japan’s bid for next-gen chip domination • ZebethMedia

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 11, 2022Posted in Enterprise, Government & Policy, Japan, semiconductors, VentureNo Comments

As the tech war between the U.S. and China intensifies, Japan has spotted an opening to build a viable alternative for semiconductors — not least so that its own consumer electronics firms do not run out of memory chips. Now, eight major Japanese tech firms and car makers, including Kioxia, NEC, NTT, SoftBank, Sony and Toyota, are teaming up in a consortium to launch an advanced chip maker. Rapidus, as it will be called, aims to develop and mass-produce the next generation of logic semiconductors by 2027. The Japanese government said Friday it will back Rapidus with 70 billion yen (~$500 million), joining the eight tech corporations to reduce its dependency on chip production in other countries like Taiwan. According to Japan’s industry ministry, each participating company will invest approximately 1 billion yen (~$ 7 million) in Rapidus, with MUFG Bank injecting 300 million yen. “Semiconductors are going to be a critical component for developing new leading-edge technologies such as AI, digital industries and health-tech,” Minister of Economy, Trade and Industry Yasutoshi Nishimura said at a news conference today. “Semiconductors are becoming even more important from an economic security perspective” due to the rising geopolitical risks. Last week, Japan unveiled its plan to allocate 350 billion yen ($2.38 billion) to build a joint research center with the U.S. with the goal of developing 2-nanometer advanced chips. A number of research institutions and semiconductor companies in the U.S, Japan and Europe will participate in the research hub to collaborate. In addition to the new joint research hub investment, the Japanese government plans to invest 450 billion yen in advanced production and 370 billion yen in securing materials required for manufacturing. IBM is reportedly partnering with Rapidus, which will have to get a license from IBM to manufacture sub-2 nanometer chip technology in Japan. Rapidus aims to develop 2-nanometers chips, which can be used for 5G, quantum computing, data centers, self-driving vehicles and digital smart cities. Japan has previously subsidized global semiconductor allies, including Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing, Micron, and Western Digital, to expand their chip production in Japan. The idea here is to strengthen its competitiveness in the semiconductor sector with R&D and production of its own advanced chips, primarily for Japanese car makers and tech companies’ use, but potentially for others, too. While global competitors have outperformed in the industry, Japan’s latest logic semiconductor production lines are for 40-nm chips, per media outlet. Samsung has started mass production of 3 nm this year, and TSMC plans to begin its 3 nm mass production late this year.

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

By zebethcontrolPosted on November 10, 2022Posted in AI, Enterprise, funding, Mem, note taking, OpenAI, Robotics & AI, StartupsNo Comments

Last year, OpenAI announced the OpenAI Startup Fund, a tranche through which it and its partners, including Microsoft, are investing in early-stage AI companies tackling major problems. Mum’s been the word since on which companies have received infusions from the Fund. But today, the OpenAI Startup Fund revealed that it led a $23.5 million investment in Mem, a work-focused app that taps AI to automatically organize notes. The investment values Mem at $110 million post-money and brings the startup’s total raised to $29 million. Co-founded by Kevin Moody and Dennis Xu, Mem differentiates itself from traditional note-taking apps by emphasizing “lightweight organization,” in Moody and Xu’s words. The workflow revolves around search and a chronological timeline, allowing users to attach topic tags, tag other users and add recurring reminders to notes. Mem users can capture quick notes, send links and save images from anywhere using SMS, messaging apps and the platform’s mobile client. Collaboration features let teams share, edit and comment on notes and directly attach them to shared calendars for faster reference. Mem’s search experience uses AI to search across notes, aiming to understand which notes might be most relevant in a given moment to a particular person. Moody and Xu say the platform is designed to augment knowledge workers in their typical responsibilities, like reading through pages of information, extracting the pieces relevant to a particular question and transforming the information into an answer or a report. Mem taps AI to organize notes in real time. There’s no doubt knowledge-seeking tasks are time-consuming. According to Gartner, professionals spend 50% of their working hours searching for information and on average take 18 minutes to locate a file (albeit the veracity of metrics like these has been challenged over the years). One source estimates that document disorganization costs businesses $3,900 per employee each year in productivity losses, making Mem an attractive proposition if the tech works as advertised. “The number one thing we hear from the organizations we talk to is the desire to be able to marry their vast troves of proprietary knowledge with … generative AI models — to support use cases that range from conducting research to writing to selling and beyond,” Moody and Xu told ZebethMedia in an email interview. “The magic of Mem is that we bring together your own private and proprietary data along with state-of-the-art generative language models to unlock truly personalized, factual outputs. We combine knowledge sources across the individual, team and organizational levels, leading to significantly better performance across the board.” Mem recently launched Mem It for Twitter, which allows users to save threads, get AI-generated summaries of their contents and see suggestions for similar tweets. It’s also continuing to refine Mem X, Mem’s built-in work assistant, with new features like Smart Write and Smart Edit, which leverages AI to generate text based on a prompt, summarize files, generate titles for documents and let users use natural language commands to edit or format text. Mem’s AI-powered writing tools, which are launching in preview soon. The plan for the foreseeable future is to increasingly lean into these sorts of AI-powered experiences, Moody and Xu say, with support from OpenAI through the OpenAI Startup Fund. OpenAI Startup Fund participants receive early access to new OpenAI systems and Azure resources from Microsoft in addition to capital. “OpenAI is obviously leading the wave of technological revolutions that we are riding,” Moody and Xu said. “This makes the OpenAI Startup Fund the ideal partner for what we’re building — for both the technical expertise and strategic guidance they bring to the table.” OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap, who also manages the OpenAI Startup Fund, added in an emailed statement: “Mem uses powerful AI to make knowledge workers more productive by removing the tedium and drudgery of organizing and accessing information, ultimately allowing people to focus on the parts of their work that matter. Their vision aligns squarely with our goal at the OpenAI Startup Fund to accelerate companies using AI to enhance productivity and, more broadly, human potential.” Mem competes with a number of companies seeking to tackle the same knowledge-finding and notes-organizing challenges. In enterprise search, there’s Glean, which recently raised $100 million in a venture equity round. On the knowledge management side, Atlassian’s wiki-like collaborative workspace Confluence and Notion, which was valued at $2 billion in 2020, still dominate. But Moody and Xu argue that 16-employee Mem has an advantage in that it’s “self-organizing,” ostensibly resulting in less manual curation and labor. While they declined to reveal Mem’s revenue or the names of any major customers, they assert that Mem is successful, owing to its AI-driven tech. “We’re confident in our unique approach to self-organizing and generative knowledge management. … Our personalized machine learning models not only help knowledge workers stay organized automatically, but also go beyond simply helping find things — we actually help people do their work,” Moody and Xu said. “The shift to remote work has made effective, asynchronous knowledge sharing more important than ever, and the market slowdown has caused companies to focus on efficiency. Our AI-assisted knowledge work saves people time, and the rapid improvement in large language models gives us a further tailwind.”