Founders and New York

Making AI actually work. Ecosystems, category creation and disruption. Arist, Fora and datascalehr.

Jason and I were in New York and New Jersey last week, planning world domination and other such things.

With Joe from Fora.

We also managed a jog or two in Central Park, and a lot of fancy coffee. We met with investors, start ups, strategic partners, and 3 of our portfolio companies.

Arist

First up, we talked with two of the founders of Arist; Michael and Ryan. Jason invested in Arist before they came out of YC several years ago.

In early 2023, within weeks of chatGPT coming out, they were launching genAI capabilities. 2 years later, that early bet is playing off. The founders have deep conviction about how people learn better. It disrupts the traditional method of a long course, and brings learning to where many of us work, on our phones. Check out this demo.

The newest capability in development is essentially an “AI employee” for the L&D department. This will launch in the next month or so. Check out the announcement here.

I’m thrilled to see the founders taking an opinionated stance on learning and the L&D department. For instance, they have picked up on what it takes to train sales people. “We keep teaching sales like a class when we need to teach it like a sport.” Read the full post. Also more on their site. They are also doing a great job of helping customers actually measure the impact of the product. Here’s an excerpt from a case study at Baxter, a major pharma company.

Arist are managing to innovate the product rapidly, for instance adding new product lines, and scaling the GTM and delivery machine. It is a great example of leading with a wedge, and then expanding. In strategy-speak, having successfully claimed mobile SMS delivery, they are now demarcating broader boundaries.

They have strengthened partnerships with relevant industry players, and are getting strong analyst endorsement. It’s great to see the progress. Well played Ryan, Maxime and Michael.

Fora

We then headed over to meet Joe at Fora. Until a few years ago, recording meetings was not really a thing, but partly as a result of Covid, many organizations now record meetings, and many people use first generation summarization tooling. Joe and his team are convinced that they can define a new category of workforce tools, what they are calling conversation intelligence. Fora takes meeting summaries and other unstructured data sources, summarizes them and intelligently surfaces them for executives. Think of it as real time newspaper of what’s going in the business. Imagine the CEO going to meet the CEO of the biggest customer, and having a summary of all the meetings and issues relating to that customer before going into the meeting. Imagine knowing the salesforce sentiment a week before before quarter end.

They have done the initial heavy lifting on the engineering side (security, granular privacy etc are really key), and early adopters are thrilled with the product. Here’s a case study from CAI. Joe is a second time founder, and we can see that in terms of how he is building the GTM machine and focusing on the ICP.

Readers of my blog will know that I’m conscious of the limitations of Gen AI, but that I’m also excited about deploying it where appropriate. Summarizing vast amounts of unstructured conversational data turns out to be one of those appropriate use cases. Doing this accurately and safely is where Fora excels.

Datascalehr

We also had dinner with Jerome, from datascalehr. We invested a couple of weeks ago, here’s a write up.

Jerome is solving payroll’s biggest challenge, integration. We think of it as part of the fundamental infrastructure for the next 40 years of core HR and payroll. We reckon that eventually almost every payroll vendor in the world will rely on datascalehr. Payroll is not a solved problem.

Bringing it together

All three of these vendors are building solutions that simply weren’t possible to build even 18 months ago. They have gone deep in AI, not for AI’s sake, but to solve a specific work problem. Today Arist is disrupting how people learn, for the better. Fora is giving executives precision insights, and datascalehr is changing the payroll industry’s approach to integration.

We haven’t rushed into AI related investments, so it may well be we have a missed out on a couple of great companies in our space along the way. But we are building our knowledge and conviction deliberately. Our investment thesis continues to evolve. One of the areas I’m pondering is how AI changes the value creation and capture in the HR Tech ecosystem. I’m digging into the latest AI and ecosystem research, more to come on that.

This week I’m back up at Oxford for the last module of the AI diploma, and then Jason and I will head to Slush in Helsinki. We plan to meet a bunch of VCs, founders, investors and more. Drop us a note if you are in Helsinki.

I always listen to this song when I go to New York. I think you should too. Elbow is the business.