In major markets such as the United States, the total amount of venture companies is decreasing year by year, and there are concerns that venture companies themselves may be struggling to raise further funds, and founders may be feeling anxious. . After all, if private market investment does not pick up in the coming quarters, total startup investment in 2024 may trend further down.
Some startups are working to combat the economic slowdown, including this week Intently, which is rolling out a new service called Founder AI. The premise of this service is simple. Look through your personal data, understand who you know, categorize those connections based on their background in terms of what they've built, and then look for warm investments from existing founders. Create some recommended paths to home referrals. Communication network.
The objective is to identify the best way to approach the most suitable investors, as most people will not give you many referrals. That's why you need to be sure to aim at targets that are likely to yield good results.
Under the hood, the service is a little more complex. Intently CEO and Co-Founder Slava Solonitsyn He told TechCrunch that his team first built Founder AI as a service business to make sure they understood what founders had, needed, and wanted. , he said he then turned the results into a product with the help of AI.
It's not just AI fairy dust, it's the heart. A new service from the Intently team uses vector search to categorize relevance. According to my (admittedly lukewarm) understanding of vectors, this makes sense. However, it doesn't try to vectorize everything. During the construction process, Solonitsyn and co-founders Dmitry Starodubtsev and Mika Melchanka used key vectors, as simply using every possible data point would be prohibitively expensive. I had to narrow my focus to make sure I was.
The company noted that it has only raised single-digit million dollars to date, including a $3.3 million round last spring. The company said it is considering raising more funding, likely in the range of $5 million to $10 million. Of course, how well Founder AI performs in the hands of founders will help determine how much funding Intently can raise.
The service has even bigger plans. Fundraising is not the ultimate goal of our activities. Instead, startups will implement their technology into new job areas, such as business development, in a timely manner. Considering the size of the market for sales tools, this isn't a huge shock. But having software that can intelligently read users' own connections and help them make communication choices could actually help reduce overall digital communication by preventing wasted messages. That would be a win for everyone.
Intently is a Y Combinator-backed company, so Founder AI could gain early adoption among fellow accelerators. We will keep an eye on whether this new service will be something that founders want to use and pay for. We intentionally plan to charge $99 per month for the tool, and more if customers want to use more data sources in their connection explorations. That seems reasonable. The more data a customer wants to process, the more computing costs will increase. After all, if Intently's product works, it could lead to more venture activity in the market. right? We will talk about the effective use of AI from a startup perspective.