Generative artificial intelligence (AI) company Dust has raised an additional $16 million in funding to expand its platform that helps businesses deploy AI assistants for internal use cases.
The company plans to use the new funding, led by Sequoia Capital, to grow its team and accelerate product development, it said in a blog post on Thursday.
According to the article, Dust, which was founded in February 2023, offers a platform that leverages companies' knowledge to help design and deploy teams of specialized AI assistants that use any of today's leading AI models.
“As a 'genAI native' company, we believe in highly specialized assistants that function as practical tools, not just general-purpose question-answering gadgets,” the company said in a post.
Dust said possible use cases for these AI assistants include creating job descriptions for recruiters and reviewing candidate cover letters, assisting engineers with incident resolution with up-to-date runbooks, providing meeting notes and up-to-date objection-handling battle cards for sales teams, and generating SQL queries for sales operations.
“Dust helps these teams and others get an assistant up and running in minutes, customize it to their specific needs, and share it across their companies,” the company said in a post.
According to the article, the Dust platform connects to a company's data wherever it is, enables AI assistants to leverage that data, allows companies to use the AI models of their choice to avoid vendor lock-in, and keeps data secure.
One company using the platform, European business banking solutions provider Qonto, said in a release that integrating Dust has enabled its entire team to test and deploy AI solutions while keeping customer data safe.
“Today, 75% of our team is using the power of gen-AI every month, and we expect to have the entire company using our AI assistant frequently by the end of the year,” Qonto co-founder and CEO Alexandre Prot said in the release.
In another recent development in this space, Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI assistant, announced on Tuesday that it is adding new features to improve team collaboration and productivity.
On June 17, cloud banking company nCino unveiled an AI-powered solution dubbed Banking Advisor, a “banker-centric, conversational copilot tool” that streamlines banking operations and provides portfolio management capabilities to help banks track and comply with regulatory requirements.
