GenAI may be one of the most exciting technologies today. However, although it is one of the fastest-growing, it also poses a challenge for companies eager to adopt it. With each new innovation in GenAI, businesses will need to stay on top of trends as well as validate what is working while maintaining a semblance of accuracy, compliance, and security. is needed.
There are a number of startups that tailor GenAI tools to the needs of businesses. For example, Arcee creates solutions that help companies securely train, benchmark, and manage his GenAI models, and Intel spinout Articul8 AI builds algorithm-powered enterprise software.
Now, a new upstart has joined the crew.
Himank Jain, Atharva Padhye, and Prabhat Singh are co-founders of Crux, which builds AI models that answer questions about business data in plain language, along with OpenAI's ChatGPT. Padier explains:
“By using simple natural language commands, executives have all the reports, insights, root cause analysis, and predictions at their fingertips,” he said in an email. “For example, marketers using HubSpot can ask questions like, 'Why is my email campaign to new users having a low conversion rate?'”
Crux (Jain, Padhye, and Singh pivoted nearly 15 times to arrive at the platform's current form) transforms the schema, the structure of a database, into a “semantic layer” that AI models can understand. In addition to this, Crux allows customers to customize question answering models to suit their business intelligence needs, conditions and policies, improving the quality of their output, according to Padhye.
Crux's platform for building, customizing, and deploying GenAI models and tools for the enterprise. Image credits: core
Crux leverages a multi-model framework that decomposes user questions into individual parts and distributes these parts into specialized, dedicated models. For example, one of his models, which Padhye calls an “explanatory agent,” asks follow-up questions to understand the user's intent.
Crux is deployed on-premises and does not use customer data to train its models, Padhye said.
“Crux aims to [an] It’s an AI-powered decision engine for enterprises,” said Padhye. “Crux challenges existing business intelligence tools by accelerating iteration and reimagining the analytics stack as a decision stack.”
In addition to selling subscriptions, Crux makes money by charging setup and maintenance fees depending on the type and size of a company's deployment. This has proven to be a profitable model. According to Padhye, Crux's annual recurring revenue reached $240,000 in four months with a customer base of four companies.
Crux aims to remain a small organization for now, increasing its number of employees to up to around 20 people by the end of the year. But with $2.6 million in capital recently raised from Emergent Ventures, Y Combinator and a number of angel backers, Paddy says Crux will focus on expanding its “upscale market” and acquiring new enterprise customers. said.
Added Anupam Rastogi from Emergent Ventures via email:
“BI and data analytics are on the brink of a major transformation driven by large-scale language models and advanced AI. Crux is poised for exponential growth over the next 10 years. There is a lot of interest.”