Jamix emerges with $3M pre-seed and model-agnostic AI assistant

Every day within the yr 2024 is stuffed with AI-related information. But Jamix, a brand new San Francisco-based enterprise AI startup based by former Instagram and Airbnb engineers, is hoping to chop by the noise by specializing in fixing a really specific, but widely-shared downside: permitting corporations to make use of generative AI assistants with out compromising their information privateness and safety.

Jamix provides what it says is a safe, model-agnostic AI assistant designed to reinforce office productiveness.

Last week, it emerged from stealth with $3 million in pre-seed funding led by Audacious Ventures, with contributions from angel buyers together with Keith Peiris (CEO, Tome), Chris Prucha (Co-founder, Notion & Origin), Oleg Rogynskyy (CEO, People.ai), Nate Smith (Founder, Lever), Bobby Lo (Founder, Vurb), Zac Altman (Founder, LoungeBuddy), Neha Sampat (CEO, Contentstack), Nishant Patel (Founder & CTO, Contentstack).

“Most companies don’t really have the resources to build a sophisticated tool like this,” stated co-founder and CEO Matt Zitzmann, in an unique video name interview with VentureBeat final week. “That’s the gap we’re striving to fill in this market, to help companies have their own custom, internal version of ChatGPT or an AI assistant that protects people’s data.”

Zitzmann and his co-founder Conglei Shi, who serves as Jamix’s Chief Technology Officer (CTO), know the enterprise software program house properly with resumes at a few of the greatest names in tech: Zitzmann labored at Google, Instagram and its father or mother firm Meta, which acquired his former firm Kamcord. Shi labored at IBM on its Watson AI workforce and later at Airbnb.

Enhancing office productiveness whereas sustaining safety

Jamix’s philosophy is easy: “For AI to really reach its full potential, it needs to be connected to your data, your apps, and your APIs,” Zitzmann informed VentureBeat.

He famous that whereas corporations could attempt to use AI instruments with out exposing their information with the nice intention of maintaining it safe and secure, this really severely limits the capabilities of AI to meaningfully enhance and develop their enterprise.

Zitzmann posed a hypothetical scenario about an organization hiring a human intern, however not giving them entry to any of the agency’s company data.

“That intern is not going to be very effective, right?” Zitzmann requested rhetorically. “That’s effectively what AI is today.”

Instead, Jamix’s strategy is to permit its AI assistant to be built-in right into a agency’s present, generally used office software program apps similar to Google Workspace or Notion, and messaging apps together with Slack, and supply data again to the person on demand.

This permits Jamix to carry out three broad classes of duties for enterprises:

The first is search throughout apps: as an alternative of getting the person toggle forwards and backwards for a chunk of knowledge they’re on the lookout for, the Jamix search bar returns outcomes from throughout all of the completely different apps it’s related to through API backends, be it an e-mail software, Slack or Google Docs, permitting the person to see and entry that data extra shortly and simply. Jamix refers to those because the enterprise’s “data sources.”

“For 20 years now, there’s been this idea of enterprise search, where you have on search bar that is like Google for all your corporate data,” Zitzmann defined. “This solves the pain point of ‘I know it’s somewhere, but I don’t know if it’s in my Gmail, Slack, or a Google Doc.’”

The second is “chat with apps and data,” in accordance with Zitzmann. This takes the widespread early generative AI use case of importing a PDF and with the ability to have interaction in a dialog with an AI software similar to ChatGPT to floor particular data or summarize it, however expands it to all of the paperwork that an organization needs its workers to have the ability to entry.

As an instance, Zitzmann stated customers can ask its AI assistant hooked as much as a recruiting software “how many candidates do we have in the engineer pipeline, how many offers have we made, how many have been declined?” and obtain the solutions with out having to go hunt by the app itself to search out them.

Finally, in arguably probably the most formidable a part of the providing, Jamix is permitting its AI assistant to “initiate actions” on the person’s behalf inside their office apps, primarily appearing as an AI agent to file bug reviews or consider incoming resumes to a specific job itemizing based mostly on how properly they match the job itemizing standards. Another operate is summarizing data from URLs.

All of those capabilities goal to save lots of time and cut back the handbook effort required in each day duties.

Committed to person privateness and safety

Yet, by the identical token, Jamix retains a dedication to person privateness by encrypting all its clients’ information and inking agreements with AI mannequin suppliers, together with OpenAI for ChatGPT and GPT-3.5/4, to not prepare on Jamix person information.

In so doing, Jamix’s AI assistant goals to handle key considerations surrounding information safety within the integration of AI into office operations.

“The contractual agreement we have with those [AI model] providers is they’re not allowed to train on that [customer] data,” Zitzmann stated.

For clients who’re nonetheless extra involved with closed mannequin suppliers, Zitzmann famous that Jamix works with open supply AI fashions as properly, permitting its enterprise clients to run the AI assistant on their very own non-public clouds or on premises.

Jamix’s dedication to mannequin agnosticism permits it to adapt to the fast-paced evolution of AI know-how. This technique allows companies to leverage the simplest and cost-efficient AI fashions with out being constrained to a single supplier, facilitating simple adaptation to new applied sciences.

Notable backers

The $3M pre-seed funding, led by Audacious Ventures with participation from a number of notable angel buyers, signifies robust business assist for Jamix’s strategy to AI within the office.

Zitzmann, Co-founder and CEO, emphasised the importance of launching a product designed to combine deeply into firm operations whereas safeguarding information privateness and providing flexibility in AI mannequin utilization.

Nakul Mandan, Founder and Partner of Audacious Ventures, shared his assist for Jamix’s mission to supply AI assistants that cater to the particular wants of enterprises whereas prioritizing information safety and person permissions.

“We imagine a future where every knowledge worker in the world will have AI assistants at their disposal, but these will have to be built with enterprise needs in mind,” Mandan stated in an announcement supplied to VentureBeat. “Jamix’s AI assistant helps users search and interact with the knowledge in their organizations and, furthermore, automates tasks for them. They accomplish all of this while keeping data security and permissions in mind.”

With its latest funding and product launch, Jamix goals to supply a brand new resolution within the AI assistant marketplace for corporations seeking to improve productiveness whereas sustaining strict information safety requirements. The platform’s deep integration with office instruments and its model-agnostic strategy spotlight Jamix’s dedication to offering versatile and safe AI options for companies.