As the total amount of venture capital declines year over year in key markets like the United States, and venture capital firms themselves struggle to raise more capital, founders might worry. After all, if private market investment doesn’t pick up in the coming quarters, we could be on track for another year of decline in total startup investment in 2024.
Some startups are working to combat the slowdown, including Intently, which is rolling out a new service called Founder AI this week. The premise of the service is simple: it will look at your personal data, understand who you know, sort those connections based on their own track record in terms of what they’ve built, and then come up with some recommended paths to warm up your investor introductions. existing founder. network.
The goal is to identify the best ways to reach the most relevant investors, as most people will fail to do this. Also many presentations for you. This is why you want to make sure that you are aiming for targets that might prove useful.
Under the hood, the service is a little more complex; so much so that Intently CEO and co-founder Slava Solonitsyn told TechCrunch that his team first built Founder AI as a services company to ensure they understood what founders have, what they need and what they want, and then produce this work with the help of AI.
Not just AI pixie dust, mind you. The Intently team’s new service uses vector search to sort for relevance, which from my understanding of vectors – which is admittedly lukewarm – makes sense. But he will not seek to vectorize everything. During the building process, Solonitsyn and fellow co-founders Dmitry Starodubtsev and Mika Melchanka had to focus on making sure they used the important vectors, as simply using every possible data point would be a waste. prohibitive cost.
The company stressed that it only has single-digit millions on hand so far, including $3.3 million last spring. The startup is looking to raise more capital, perhaps between $5 million and $10 million. Of course, the effectiveness of Founder AI when it gets into the hands of founders will help determine how much capital Intently can raise.
He has larger plans for the service; fundraising is not the ultimate goal of his work. Instead, the startup will bring its technology to new areas of work over time, such as business development. Given the size of the sales tools market, this isn’t a very shocking idea. But having software that can intelligently read your own connections and help you make communication choices could really help. reduce total digital communication avoiding wasted messages. It would be a win for everyone.
Intently is a Y Combinator-backed company, which means it could see rapid adoption of Founder AI among its accelerator brethren. We’ll be listening to see if its new service becomes something founders want to use and pay for. Intently intends to charge $99 per month for the tool, or more if the customer wants to use more data sources in their connection search. This seems reasonable; the more data a customer wants to mine, the higher the computational costs. So the higher the price. All in all, if Intently’s product works, we could see more total venture capital activity in the market? RIGHT? Talk about good use of AI from a startup perspective.
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