Last year, OpenAI announced the OpenAI Startup Fund, a tranche through which it and its partners, including Microsoft, invest in early-stage AI companies tackling big problems. Mom has been the word ever since that companies have received infusions from the Fund. But today, the OpenAI Startup Fund revealed it was leading a $23.5 million investment in memoa work-oriented app that taps AI to automatically organize notes.
The investment values Mem at $110 million post-money and brings the startup’s total raised amount to $29 million.
Co-founded by Kevin Moody and Dennis Xu, Mem differentiates from traditional note-taking apps by emphasizing “lightweight organization,” in the words of Moody and Xu. The workflow revolves around search and a chronological timeline, allowing users to add topic tags, tag other users, and add recurring reminders to notes.
Mem users can create quick notes, send links and save images anywhere using SMS, messaging apps and the platform’s mobile client. Collaboration features allow teams to share, edit, and comment on notes and add them directly to shared calendars for faster reference.
Mem’s search experience uses AI to search notes, with the goal of understanding which notes are most relevant to a particular person at any given time. Moody and Xu say the platform is designed to extend knowledge workers into their typical responsibilities, such as reading pages of information, extracting the bits relevant to a particular question, and turning the information into an answer or an answer. report.
Mem taps AI to organize notes in real time. Image Credits: memo
There is no doubt that seeking knowledge is time consuming. According to for Gartner, professionals spend 50% of their work time searching for information and it takes an average of 18 minutes to locate a file (although the veracity of such statistics has been challenged over the years). A source estimates that document disorganization costs companies $3,900 per employee in lost productivity each year, making Mem an attractive proposition if the technology works as advertised.
“The most important thing we hear from the organizations we talk to is the desire to be able to combine their vast wealth of proprietary knowledge with … generative AI models – to support use cases ranging from conducting research to writing to selling and more,” Moody and Xu told ukbusinessupdates.com in an email interview. “The magic of Mem is that we bring your own private and proprietary data together with state-of-the-art generative language models to unlock truly personalized, factual output. We combine knowledge sources at individual, team and organizational level, leading to significantly better performance across the board.”
Mem recently launched Mem It for Twitter, which allows users to save threads, get AI-generated summaries of their content, and see suggestions for similar tweets. It also continues to refine Mem X, Mem’s built-in work assistant, with new features such as Smart Write and Smart Edit, which use AI to generate text based on a prompt, summarize files, generate titles for documents, and provide natural language commands to users. to use to edit or format text.
Mem’s AI-powered writing tools, launching in preview soon. Image Credits: memo
The plan for the near future is to increasingly leverage these kinds of AI-powered experiences, Moody and Xu say, with support from OpenAI through the OpenAI Startup Fund. In addition to capital, participants in the OpenAI Startup Fund will get early access to new OpenAI systems and Azure resources from Microsoft.
“OpenAI is clearly leading the wave of technology revolutions we’re going through,” said Moody and Xu. “This makes the OpenAI Startup Fund the ideal partner for what we build – for both the technical expertise and strategic guidance they bring to the table.”
OpenAI COO Brad Lightcap, who also manages the OpenAI Startup Fund, added in an emailed statement: “Mem uses powerful AI to make knowledge workers more productive by eliminating the tedium and shuffling of organizing and accessing information, allowing people to ultimately focus on the parts of their work that matter. Their vision aligns seamlessly with our goal at the OpenAI Startup Fund to accelerate companies using AI to enhance productivity and, more broadly, human potential to improve.”
Mem competes with a number of companies that want to tackle the same challenges of finding knowledge and organizing notes. In enterprise search, Glean recently raised $100 million in a venture equity round. In terms of knowledge management, Atlassian’s wiki-like collaborative workspace Confluence and Notion, valued at $2 billion in 2020, still dominates.
But Moody and Xu argue that with 16 employees, Mem has the advantage of being “self-organizing,” which ostensibly results in less manual processing and labor. While they declined to disclose Mem’s earnings or the names of major customers, they claim Mem is successful thanks to its AI-powered technology.
“We are confident in our unique approach to self-organizing and generative knowledge management. … Our personalized machine learning models not only help knowledge workers stay organized automatically, but go beyond just helping them find things – we actually help people do their jobs,” said Moody and Xu. “The shift to remote working has made effective and asynchronous knowledge sharing more important than ever, and the slowdown in the market has led companies to focus on efficiency. Our AI-supported knowledge work saves people time, and the rapid improvement of large language models gives us even more wind.”
