The year before, OpenAI announced the OpenAI Startup Fund, an investment fund of funds through which the company and its partners, including Microsoft and Microsoft, are investing in the early stages of AI companies solving major issues.
Mum has been the buzzword since companies received funds through the Fund. However, today OpenAI Startup Fund announced that it has invested in Mem. OpenAI Startup Fund revealed that it was behind a $23.5 million funding for Mem, a productivity-focused application that uses AI to organize notes automatically.
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OpenAI is leading a $23.5M round of Mem
Mem values the investment with a value of $110 million post-money. This brings the total amount raised by the startup to $29 million.
Kevin Moody and Dennis Xu founded the company; Mem differentiates itself from other note-taking applications by focusing on “lightweight organization,” as per Moody and Xu’s terms. The process is based on searching and a chronological timeline that allows users to create tags for topics, add tags to other users and create recurring reminder notes.
Mem users can take quick notes, send links and save images from any location using SMS, messaging apps, and the mobile client of the platform. Collaboration tools let teams collaborate, edit and add comments on notes. They can also directly link them to calendars shared by the team to make them easier to review.
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Mem’s search experience utilizes AI to look up notes to determine what notes are the most relevant at a particular time. Moody and Xu declare that the platform has been intended to aid the knowledge workers’ tasks, such as reading over pages of information to find the information that is relevant to a particular query and then turning the information into a response or report.
There’s no doubt that knowledge-seeking tasks take a lot of time. According to Gartner, experts spend about 50 percent of their work hours looking for information and, on average, take 18 minutes to find the right data file (albeit the accuracy of such metrics has been questioned over the decades). One source estimates that document mismanagement can cost companies $3,900 annually in productivity loss. This makes Mem an attractive option when the software is as claimed.
“The most common item we get from companies we speak to is that they want to combine their huge collection of proprietary information and … generational AI models to aid in applications that range from conducting research, writing, selling and even more,” Moody and Xu said to TechCrunch through an email exchange. “The power in Mem lies in the way that we integrate your personal and confidential data with the most advanced machine learning models that can create real-time, accurate outputs. We integrate knowledge sources at the team, individual and organizational levels, resulting in substantially better efficiency across the board.”
Mem recently introduced Mem It for Twitter lets users sore threads in their accounts, receive AI-generated summaries of their content, and get suggestions for tweets with similar content. It’s also working on improving Mem X, Mem’s inbuilt work assistant, with features like Smart Write and Smart Edit that make use of AI to create text based on input, make summary files, generate titles for documents, and allow users to utilize natural languages to edit or create text.
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Mem’s AI-powered writing software will be available in preview mode soon.
The goal for the near future is to continue to lean into these types of AI-powered applications, Moody and Xu say, with the help of OpenAI through their OpenAI Startup Fund. OpenAI Startup Fund Participants get access to early access to new OpenAI systems as well as Azure tools from Microsoft as well as capital.
“OpenAI is clearly at the forefront of the technological innovations we’re enjoying,” Moody and Xu declared. “This is what makes OpenAI Startup Fund OpenAI Startup Fund the ideal partner for the project we’re working on in terms of the technological expertise and strategic direction they provide on the scene.”
OpenAI CEO Brad Lightcap, who also is the manager of the OpenAI Startup Fund, added in an email message: “Mem uses powerful AI to help knowledge workers become more efficient by removing the monotony and burden that comes with organizing and accessing information and allowing them to concentrate on the areas of their jobs that are important. Their mission aligns with our vision for the OpenAI Startup Fund to accelerate companies’ use of AI to increase productivity and, in general, human capacity.”
Mem competes against various companies looking to address the same notes-organizing and knowledge-finding issues. In the enterprise space, it’s Glean, which recently raised $100 million in a venture capital round. On the side of knowledge management, Atlassian’s collaborative workspace that resembles a wiki, Confluence, and Notion, valued at $2 billion in 2020, continues to be the most popular.
However, Moody and Xu claim that the 16 employees of Mem have a distinct advantage in the sense that Mem is “self-organizing,” ostensibly resulting in lower manual curation and work. However, they refused to disclose Mem’s earnings or the names of its major customers; however, they claim that Mem is profitable, thanks to its AI-driven technology.
“We’re certain of our unique self-organizing and generative knowledge management method. The personalized machine learning models don’t just assist knowledge workers to stay organized, but are more than just aiding them in their search for items — we aid people to do their job,” Moody and Xu declared.
“The shifting to remote working has rendered efficient and synchronous knowledge sharing more vital than ever, and the slowdown in the market has forced companies to be focused on efficiency. Our AI-powered knowledge work can save people time and energy, and the rapid development of large language models provides an additional boost.”
