Count Arlington's Pienso among the startups benefiting from investors' interest in anything related to artificial intelligence.
The 8-year-old company, which developed an AI tool for companies to use for the deciphering of vast troves of data, just pulled in a $10 million Series A funding round, bringing its total lifetime funding to $18 million.
Its technology isn't looking to compete with OpenAI's ChatGPT, but CEO Birago Jones acknowledged that the buzz around ChatGPT and similar tools have helped his and other AI startups get out in front of more investors. Last year, roughly one in three venture capital dollars invested went to AI-related companies.
"We started the funding [round] right before ChatGPT got released," Jones told me in an interview. "It shifted the way the market would perceive our value."
Now, Jones is positioning Pienso, which doesn't require its customers to deploy any sort of coding for its implementation within an organization, as a platform that adds even more capabilities for AI tools to perform.
Pienso's AI model creation tool can be used by companies or organizations to gather customer insights, decipher documents or moderate content online. Pienso's customers use the no-code tech to build interactive models based directly on internal company resources like chat logs, call transcripts, or service contracts. This then allows Pienso's customers to better understand their data, like learning about the types of calls support lines are receiving or if the contents of internal documents have become outdated or inaccurate.
Pienso offers its product via licensing agreements.
Jones noted that Pienso does not collect or store any of its customers' data regarding the internal information that customer-made AI models are fed. He considers Pienso a standout in the AI world for this given the frequent approach by larger tech firms to do the opposite when it comes to monetizing the data that's been shared with AI tools.
One of Pienso's biggest commercial clients is Sky UK, a British broadcaster and telecommunications firm. Jones explained that Sky's customer service teams are using Pienso's platform to create models that better help support agents understand customer issues and offer solutions to them while a call is taking place. It's saving a significant amount of time for Sky's agents and customers alike, he said.
"They're running their call center calls through the models that they create on our platform," Jones said. "The main use case that people have in this space is that there's a large data feed and one human or many humans can't read everything. So, can you use a model to distill down those data objects — or units or documents, whatever they are — down to the things that are most important and relevant to any human's use case."
With this capital infusion, led by new investor Latimer Ventures, an early-stage venture capital firm based in Baltimore, Jones said the company is ready to focus on growing its workforce. Venture firms Gideon Capital of New York and SRI also participated in the round, as did returning investors Uncork Capital of San Francisco and Good Growth Capital of Charleston, South Carolina.
Pienso, founded by Jones and Karthik Dinakar, has a small office in Rosslyn's Arlington Tower, though Jones said the company will soon start looking for more space. He declined to share revenue figures or number of employees. Expanding the company's sales team is a top priority, he said.
