With venture capital numbers declining year-on-year in key markets like the United States and concerns that venture capital firms themselves are struggling to raise more capital, founders may be worried. Because if private market investment doesn’t pick up in the coming quarters, we could be looking at another year of declines in overall startup investment in 2024.
Some startups are working to combat the slowdown, including Intently, which is launching a new service called Founder AI this week. The service’s premise is simple: It combs through your personal information, understands who you know, sorts those connections based on their own background and what they’ve built, and then develops a few recommended ways to warm up investor ideas about your existing founder Network.
The goal is to find the best ways to reach the most relevant investors, which most people fail to do to lots of introductions for you. That’s why you want to make sure you’re targeting goals that could prove successful.
Under the hood, the service is a bit more complex; so much so that Intently is CEO and co-founder Slava Solonitsyn told TechCrunch that his team initially built Founder AI as a services company to ensure it understood what founders have, need and want in order to later produce that work using AI.
Not just AI fairy dust, mind you. The Intently team’s new service uses vector search to determine relevance, which makes perfect sense based on my understanding of vectors – which is admittedly lukewarm. But it doesn’t try to vectorize everything. During the building process, Solonitsyn and his co-founders Dmitry Starodubtsev and Mika Melchanka had to narrow their focus to ensure they were using the vectors that mattered, as simply using all possible data points would be prohibitively expensive.
The company noted that it only has single-digit millions in funding so far, including a $3.3 million round last spring. The startup wants to raise more capital, possibly in the range of $5 million to $10 million. Of course, how well the Founder AI performs when it gets into the hands of founders will help determine how much capital Intently can raise.
There are bigger plans for the ministry; Fundraising is not the end goal of his work. Instead, the startup will bring its technology into new areas of work, such as business development, in a timely manner. Given the size of the sales tools market, this isn’t a huge surprise. But software that can intelligently read your own connections and help you make communication decisions could actually be helpful to reduce complete digital communication by eliminating wasted messages. That would be a win for everyone.
Intently is a Y Combinator-backed company, which means Founder AI may soon find traction with its accelerator brethren. We’ll be interested to see if the new service becomes something that founders want to use – and pay for. Intends to charge $99 per month for the tool, or more if the customer wants to use more data sources in their connection search. That seems reasonable; The more data a customer wants to use, the higher the computing costs. So the higher the price. All in all, perhaps we’ll see if Intently’s product works more total venture activity in the market? Right? Talk about good use of AI from a startup perspective.