Portland entrepreneur Mat Ellis is back with a new startup, and this time he is taking advantage of the latest tech evolution: artificial intelligence.
The new company is called Sixty AI, and it is building what it calls a relationship management platform. Using AI to learn a person’s habits, the software helps to alleviate email inbox overload, automate responses, send meeting prompts and reminders and generate meeting briefings and followup actions.
But, Ellis says this is not a productivity tool.
“Productivity tools are all about doing more things. And we are about having to do less and concentrate on the human side of staying in touch,” he said, noting this can be used in both professional and personal lives.
Ellis has been working on this for over a year. Initially he was calling the new venture Faster Better but pivoted the name to Sixty AI. He funded it himself for the first year. Recently, he raised $3.5 million, led by 468 Capital. The round also included a number of angel investors, he said.
Everyone who invested knew Ellis from his previous work founding Cloudability. With Cloudability Ellis tapped into what was then the new and growing trend of cloud infrastructure. As more companies moved into the cloud, Cloudability’s software helped manage how much those companies were spending.
Cloudability sold to Bellevue-based Apptio in 2019.
With Sixty AI, Ellis wants to help people manage the growing number of relationships and responsibilities they might have. He also wants to bring the benefits of an executive assistant to people who may have never thought about having an EA. When the company was coming up with a name Ellis said the team wanted it to be gender neutral to appeal to the most people.
Like a human EA, Sixty will watch how people respond to different requests and learn based on those interactions. If an email for a specific person is always answered as a priority the system will learn that this is an important person. Similarly, if something is moved into a read later folder the system can learn what items are for later reading.
Sixty doesn’t read emails but looks at the meta data. No emails go to Sixty but instead stay within Google Workspace or Microsoft 365, the two email clients compatible with Sixty.
Sixty is free for people to use. Ellis said he has plans for revenue once the tool has mass adoption. In the short term, however, there are subscriptions that will remove Sixty branding from the software. Plus, the paid tier will help you send physical cards like birthday cards when it finds birthdays or other major dates in a calendar, Ellis said.
Eventually, like a human EA, the system will be able to send flowers or other gifts for important dates, at which point the company could take a cut of that transaction.
One thing Ellis is adamant about is Sixty will not sell ads and it will not sell a person’s data.
“I’m not interested in helping other people target users,” he said.
The company has a waiting list on its website and it is slowly letting in private beta users. Ellis is planning for a public launch this fall.
The company has a full-time team of 10 and many are former Cloudability employees, including Jon Frisby, Sixty's technical co-founder and a Cloudability co-founder as well.
“Relationships in any capacity are messy and complex at times, and it's been impossible to deliver this kind of nuance until now, so we’re inspired by Sixty AI’s efforts to enable this reality,” said Florian Leibert, managing director of 468 Capital in a written statement. “The company was not only founded by a group of successful entrepreneurs and tech experts — but those who also believe in and are evangelists of personal relationships as the next cultural movement of our time, so we’re excited to back them and advance their mission.”
