Let's start with the premise that many of us take notes while interacting with customers as part of our job. While taking notes, we may need to access a customer record in Salesforce or open a Jira ticket to involve IT in a customer issue, but this requires us to engage in tedious task switching by switching from the application we were working in to open another application to complete another job or access additional information.
Noded AI, a new startup that wants to change that by making all your work tools automatically available from the place where you take your notes so you don't have to switch tasks, is coming out of stealth today with a $4 million investment.
“We're reinventing the note-taking space and using AI and a little bit of automated data science to basically put notes at the center of the enterprise,” Steve Wood, CTO and co-founder of Noded, told TechCrunch.
The name Noded isn't just a clever play on words, but because the company doesn't see notes as large documents, but as pieces of information that fit into a knowledge graph. “Your notes become a graph, and each piece of information becomes a node on the graph. So, for example, if I'm in a meeting with you, I'll see all the tasks and context around you, and that filters down to all of my notes over any period of time, whether it's weeks, months, whatever,” he said.
Noded is also designed to automatically make the apps you need available within the context of your work, so you can access all the information you need without switching programs. “So instead of having your notes in one place and all your applications in another, make your notes part of your work flow, and as you type your notes, Noded helps get them into the right system, so you're not constantly double-typing,” he said.
Wood was previously vice president of product and platform at Slack, another company trying to become central to work, but using communication rather than notes as its core mechanism. Wood says one of the things he noticed while working on building the Slack platform was the need for more context, and he feels the note metaphor provides that.
“One of the things we've learned from Slack is that without context around the customer or other business objects, all we can do is push out alerts that are hard to track and just add more confusion to our customers' operations,” he says. “Why would you care about a Zendesk ticket? Oh, right, because Acme asked about it. So we can give them that context. Not only does it make their life easier, it also cuts down a lot of noise.”
AI plays a role in how it takes work from notes and links it to applications, but for their purposes, Wood says the AI doesn't need to be that advanced. “The LLM today is perfectly fine for our purposes,” he said. “It's like having an administrator sitting there doing really boring work that you don't want to do,” he said.
Co-founder and CEO Chris Porte is a Dell Bumi alumnus, and the two co-founders worked together at Bumi before Wood joined Slack in 2020.
It's still early days: The company was founded in September and began building in earnest in the new year. “And this will be our 'Hello World' moment when we announced the company,” Port said. The startup is working with early customers and aims to release an official beta version later this year.
Today's $4 million investment was led by Boldstart Ventures, with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, 20VC and First Hand Ventures, along with co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson, Wood's former bosses at Slack, and Okta co-founder Frederick Kelest.