Malaysian artificial intelligence (AI) startup VOX has received a $250,000 investment from Silicon Valley on Monday, April 24.
The team did not disclose who the investors were.
Founded by Simone Macario, VOX is described as a “conversational AI company focused on solving problems related to Human-to-Machine Interaction (HMI)”. This is done through a linguist’s approach, allowing computers to communicate with users and vice versa.
“Simply put, we teach computers how to talk,” the founder said in an interview with the Italian-Malaysian Business Association (IMBA).
The new funds will be used to cover the operating costs of the platform for the first 50,000 users of the Shaly.ai platform.
Any document and chat
Sharly.ai is an AI productivity tool that helps parse information in documents. Users can upload any document and then ask her Sharly.ai about the document, just like they would on ChatGPT.
“ChatGPT and similar models offer a simple API to connect, but have many inherent limitations,” said Davide Selvaggio, co-founder and CTO of VOX.
“Our experience with previous products really helped us fill in the holes by tuning our model to handle thousands of pages while remaining grounded in real-world knowledge.”
Sharly.ai has three different plans. Access is free if you want to use it for personal purposes, but industry professionals who want to use it for professional reasons will have to pay $5 USD per month.
Companies wanting a more customized solution should request a quote from the company.
Sharly.ai is currently only available in English.
To test the program, I uploaded a document for the book I’m currently reading called “All Marketers Are Liars”. It took about a minute or two to process the book and provide the summary.
When asked to give some of the best advice to writers from this book, it said:
This document highlights the importance of storytelling in marketing and how storytelling influences how people feel about products and services. It emphasizes the need to have a coherent and authentic story framed in terms of the other person’s worldview. The document also mentions the power of belief and how it becomes a self-fulfilling truth. The author encourages focusing on the stories marketers tell. Because it is the product itself. The document is missing page numbers or paragraphs.
Besides directly asking questions about content, you can also enrich, critique, and simply highlight and highlight content on Sharly.ai.
Voice of VOX
Born and based in Malaysia, VOX is a B2B SaaS conversational AI commerce platform. In short, it helps companies automate their conversational experiences with their clients through AI.
Essentially, it helps you “automate conversations with ChatGPT”, allowing you to design virtual assistants or chatbots tailored to your needs.
Simone, who has a background in computer engineering, worked in Italy, China and Singapore before founding VOX in 2021.
In 2021, Simone told IMBA that AI adoption in Malaysia was still in its early stages, especially when compared to the US, EU or Chinese markets.
“Ultimately, Malaysia is less aggressive and more keen to invest in technologies that require high R&D efforts, preferring to follow trends and products previously adopted and validated in high-income countries. “In this sense, it’s a bit of a disadvantage. Take a risk,” he said.
Perhaps this explains why VOX is looking overseas for funding.
However, as Simone said, Malaysia has a “very attractive startup ecosystem that helps everyone get started with new ideas easily.”
True to this sentiment, VOX has secured US$200,000 in seed-stage funding from Malaysian seed-stage venture fund Indelible Ventures in 2022.
Hopefully, Malaysia’s AI landscape will continue to develop, led by startups including VOX, and bring more investment to homegrown AI companies.
- Click here for details on VOX.
- Read more articles we’ve written about fundraising here.
Featured image: VOX
