French startup Dust has secured $16 million in a Series A funding round led by Sequoia Capital. Dust enables companies to create custom AI assistants that employees can use to enhance their efficiency.
What sets Dust apart from other companies working on enterprise AI assistants is its unique approach. Unlike consumer-facing tools like ChatGPT, Dust assistants are integrated with a company’s data and documents. For example, when creating a new assistant in Dust, you can link it to Notion pages, Google Drive documents, Intercom conversations, or Slack.
Additionally, Dust advocates for having multiple AI assistants within a company, each tailored to specific tasks and common problems faced by different teams.
In practical terms, support teams can use a Dust assistant that understands both the knowledge base content and past support interactions. This allows new support team members to ask the @supportExpert assistant questions and receive relevant answers.
HR teams can create an AI assistant to answer questions about corporate policies, eliminating the need to search through a complex Notion database. They can also develop another assistant to draft job descriptions based on previous ones, empowering the company and freeing up HR team time.
For engineering and data teams, the use cases are straightforward. For instance, a Dust assistant can understand the company’s database schemas, allowing users to ask @SQLbuddy in plain English to write a SQL query on the customer base.
Lastly, sales teams can generate draft emails based on CRM data and the context of potential clients. If you need to create custom connectors or integrate Dust assistants with other tools, the company offers an API.
Instead of reinventing the wheel, Dust focuses on creating a universally accessible product. Since the launch of ChatGPT, many people are now familiar with AI assistants and even use them for work, despite some company policies against it. Users know how to initiate conversations, provide follow-up details, and ask the AI assistant to rephrase its responses.
Using Dust is similar, as companies build conversational assistants on the platform. Employees can access Dust’s web interface or interact with assistants directly in Slack, allowing them to be @-mentioned during conversations. Dust aims to make generative AI an everyday internal communication tool.
The startup now generates $1 million in annual recurring revenue, with late-stage tech companies like Watershed, Alan, Qonto, Pennylane, and PayFit using it extensively.
Qonto, a business banking startup, reports that 75% of its 1,600 employees use Dust assistants monthly. At Alan, a French health insurance unicorn, 80% of the company uses AI assistants weekly. Accounting tech unicorn Pennylane has created 86 custom assistants with Dust.
In addition to Sequoia Capital, existing investors like XYZ, GG1, Connect Ventures, Seedcamp, and Motier Ventures have reinvested in Dust.
Dust’s customer-focused approach means it doesn’t create its own foundation model. Instead, users can choose from large language models like OpenAI (GPT), Anthropic (Claude), Mistral, and Google’s Gemini models when building an assistant.
Several startups are working on enterprise platforms for AI agents or assistants, including Brevian, Tektonic AI, Ema, Kore.ai, and Glean. Even Atlassian, the enterprise software giant behind Jira and Confluence, has launched its AI teammate Rovo. Time will tell if Dust’s easy onboarding strategy is the right go-to-market approach.