Ask-AI raises $9 Million – Expects to be the ‘Google Search’ of Enterprise data

Ask-AI-team (company pic)

Ask-AI, an Israeli startup that uses Natural Language Processing NLP to power direct answer and insight surfacing platform, completed a $9 million seed round of funding led by Vertex Ventures and State of Mind Ventures. So, Ask-AI boasts that it will soon become the new Google for answers and recurring questions from all of an organization’s sources and customer communications.

So, where Google is the search engine that people all over the world use for surfing the web, it is about the Internet, not an Intranet. Ask-AI’s new service is about simplifying searches for data with an organization, which is especially important when dealing with huge conglomerates.

IBM explains that Natural language processing strives to build machines that understand and respond to text or voice data—and respond with text or speech of their own—in much the same way humans do.

Ask-AI’s platform allows managers and employees to receive answers and insights from all internal knowledge and customer communication sources. Current methods for receiving answers and insights are manual and time-consuming for entire organizations and Customer Experience teams in particular. Ask-AI improves this inefficient process by giving users pinpointed answers to questions instead of document links, in a way similar to Google Answers.

NLP combines computational linguistics—rule-based modeling of human language—with statistical, machine learning, and deep learning models. Together, these technologies enable computers to process human language in the form of text or voice data and to ‘understand’ its full meaning, complete with the speaker or writer’s intent and sentiment.

Ask-AI technology combines state-of-the-art Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Natural Language Processing (NLP) with a deep understanding of questions and human discourse and the ability to automatically analyze long texts and summarize them in one clear sentence. Additionally, the system identifies recurring questions and problems and makes it possible to receive business, process, and product answers and insights from all the organization’s information sources, including Slack, emails, chats, databases, monitored calls of call centers, and more, to improve customer experience, organizational knowledge, employee efficiency, and provides a complete view of the “voice of the customer.” The system uses questions for which it cannot find answers to learn, improve and help drive knowledge creation, effectively becoming the central organizational Knowledge Base.

Ask-AI was founded at the end of 2021 by Dr. Alon Talmor, who serves as CEO. Talmor, a graduate of the 8200 unit in the Israeli Defense Forces, previously founded the startup BlueTail, which was sold to Salesforce.com, and later became a Chief Data Scientist at Salesforce. He then earned a Ph.D. in AI, focusing on question-answering and NLP.

Ask’s team also includes Prof. Jonathan Berant, who leads NLP research at Tel Aviv University; Dafna Lavran, former VP and Chief of Staff at Pioneer; and Eyal Medar, who has extensive experience as a VP of R&D in startups. The company currently operates in a SaaS model and counts Ownbackup, Yotpo, Armis, Coralogix, Claroty, WalkMe, and others as its customers and design partners.

Alon Talmor said, “Companies today find themselves awash in information and data from many internal and external sources and a multitude of text-heavy communication channels. Employees spend extensive amounts of time searching for knowledge and summarizing and tagging customer communications. Our platform aims to mimic Google’s success in making answers from the web directly available but in the corporate world.”