Two former executives from troubled artificial intelligence hardware startup Humane are resurrecting with a new artificial intelligence software company that has raised $4 million at a $25 million valuation.
Brooke Hartley Moy, former head of strategic partnerships and head of product engineering at Humane, and Ken Kocienda respectively launched Infactory, an artificial intelligence fact-checking search engine. The pair left Humane in May, weeks after AI Pin debuted.
Kocienda told CNBC that Infactory’s tools are designed to search any company’s own enterprise databases as well as the open web in a transparent and explainable way. He and Hartley Moy are pitching the startup to enterprise clients in industries including finance, insurance, SaaS, healthcare services and media.
“It really depends on the opportunity we see on the enterprise side,” Infactory CEO Hartley Moy told CNBC. “Making this type of product was never going to be a good fit for a consumer hardware company.”
When Humane sent AI Pins to gadget reviewers in April, the response was tepid, with many calling it untrustworthy and not very useful. But Hartley-Moy said the departures were related to business opportunities they saw while working at Humane.
“The reality is that this has been brewing for some time and has nothing to do with the comments and how it unfolded,” she said.
Humane is currently looking for a buyer and will close a deal with HP A person familiar with the matter told CNBC at the time that the company included other companies, including more than one telecommunications company. Last year, Humane raised $100 million in funding MicrosoftLG’s venture capital arm and Tiger Global invested ahead of the announcement of its device, bringing its total funding to more than $200 million. Supporters include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and salesperson CEO Marc Benioff.
Hartley Moy has worked at Salesforce, Slack and Google before heading to Humane. There, she focused on software partnerships with cloud providers. Kocienda, CTO of Infactory, worked at apple With over 15 years of experience, he was the chief engineer who invented the keyboard auto-correction feature for the original iPhone.
The company’s seed round was led by Bee Partners, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz and others. While most of the funding came from institutional investors, Hartley Moy confirmed that Infactory also utilized small special purpose vehicles (SPVs), a type of financing Commonly used by AI companiessuch as Anthropic and Cohere.
“Fact-centered” artificial intelligence chatbot
Hartley Moy said Infactory is currently in alpha state, and the team is currently working with design partners and others to incorporate feedback before the product is widely launched later this year.
“There are many, many companies that are not AI-native companies … and they want to participate in this ecosystem,” she said. “Their business requirements are very strictly around accuracy, trustworthiness and high-quality answers. The standards for building these applications are much higher.”
Hartley Moy explains how Infactory solves this problem through a special data preparation method so that the AI model can analyze the data better and more accurately.
For example, if a doctor’s office has a patient taking three different medications, and the doctor wants to double-check potential drug interactions before prescribing a fourth medication, they can ask Infactory, which can provide an answer based on data from the internal department. Sienda said, citing his sources.
“The answer has to be correct, and the information has to be in the data that the company has built,” he said.
Kocienda said that in the age of databases, the web and mobile apps, current data is not ready for natural language models. He said that Infactory focuses on using artificial intelligence to study enterprise data, semantically understand the content in the data, and judge what types of questions can be answered based on the content in the data, and refuse to answer when it cannot be answered, rather than making something up. . This is a problem that many artificial intelligence chatbots are trying to solve.
For example, if a customer asks Shohei Ohtani how many three-pointers he has made this season, Infactory’s tool might respond that since Ohtani is a baseball player, the question is meaningless.
Google, Microsoft, OpenAI, and others are leading a generative AI arms race, with companies in nearly every industry rushing to add AI chatbots and agents powered by large language models. The market’s revenue is expected to exceed $1 trillion within ten years.
Many leading chatbots have been criticized for concocting inaccurate answers in response to user queries. Almost immediately after Google launched “Artificial Intelligence Overview” on Google SearchFor example, there has been growing public criticism after queries within AI features returned meaningless or inaccurate results, with no way to opt out.
Kocienda said that at Infactory, “there is never a black box where the problem comes into the LL.M. and the answer comes out and you don’t know where it came from.”
watch: Ex-Apple designer launches $700 human-friendly AI Pin as smartphone replacement
