(Before rebranding, Capacity was previously doing business as Jane.ai)
Today’s a big day. I’m so thrilled to announce that we have raised our Series A financing round of $8.4 million to officially launch Jane.ai.
Our mission is to make all of a company’s intelligence accessible in the simplest way possible, through an intuitive chat experience. The Capacity AI support bot is already making teams more productive and successful at organizations across a wide variety of sectors including technology, education, energy, and finance.
I am so thankful to our team here in St Louis (and our growing cadre of remote folks), our early customers and our passionate network of private investors for their time, hard work and commitment to make this day come sooner than I ever expected.
We’ve been moving fast here at Jane.ai, but it’s also been a long and extremely rewarding personal journey for me.
My Co-founder Chris Sims and I built our first messaging-based bot for the AOL Instant Messenger platform in high school in 2001. We were early to the world of natural language processing, but knew even back then that the future of messaging was bright. I remember fondly the days of selling (or not selling, we had a lot of CDs leftover) AimTalk CDs door-to-door on campus at Washington University in St. Louis my freshmen year.
Since then, I’ve been a contestant on The Apprentice: Martha Stewart (made it through 6 episodes!); built a comparison shopping engine; led and sold Answers.com; invested in the most well-funded startup in Missouri; and most recently presented at SXSW to Ashton Kutcher, Matthew McConaughey, Marc Benioff, Gary Vaynerchuk, and Melody McCloskey.
With the support of my beautiful and patient wife and four amazing kids, I’ve been able to live out my entrepreneurial dream.
AI in the Workplace.
Over the past couple of years, I found myself fascinated at how AI is revolutionizing our home lives. Voice assistants and smart home products are making it easier than ever to save money on heating and cooling, order more dog food, or play the perfect song at just the right moment. I couldn’t help but wonder, why doesn’t the same ease-of-use and access exist in the workplace? So for my next entrepreneurial chapter, I put together a team to focus on making the process of finding information in the workplace easier. That team started building Jane.ai.
The sheer volume of information and the volume of places where information is stored is growing in businesses at an almost inconceivable rate. Unfortunately, this means that on average, team members spend up to 35 percent of their time looking for information. And that’s not the only colossal waste of time. It then takes individuals more than 23 minutes to get back on task and refocus on their work — after each interruption. There has got to be a better way.
Now there is.
We have some core tenants that we view as fundamental for crafting a stellar AI-driven experience in the workplace:
AI should be:
- Comprehensive
- Ubiquitous across platforms
- Learning all the time
- In concert with the people it’s helping
The transition from Jane.ai to Capacity.
We’re so proud to bring Capacity and the convenience of workplace AI to market. Capacity already helping team members at organizations like Washington University in St. Louis, USA Mortgage and Ameren. We hope you’ll find her in your Slack or Skype channel very soon.
As I’ve mentioned, we’ve built an incredible team here in St. Louis and raised our Series A and Series B from a phenomenal network of Midwest investors. We’re ready to show the world that AI can give employees a consumer-like experience at work and eliminate the wasted time and frustration that comes with searching for information in the enterprise.
To that end, we’re thrilled to introduce your first AI support bot.