Dust Raises $16 Million to Help Companies Deploy AI Assistants

Generative artificial intelligence (AI) firm Dust has raised $16 million in additional funding to expand its platform that helps companies deploy AI assistants for internal use cases.

The firm will use the new funding, which was led by Sequoia Capital, to add to its team and accelerate its product development efforts, according to a Thursday (June 27) blog post.

Founded in February 2023, Dust offers a platform that helps teams design and deploy teams of specialized AI assistants that leverage a company’s knowledge and use any of today’s leading AI models, according to the post.

“As a ‘genAI native’ company, we believe in highly focused assistants that can act as practical tools, not just general-purpose question-answering gadgets,” the company said in the post.

Suggesting possible use cases for these AI assistants, Dust said they can draft job descriptions or review candidate cover letters for recruiters, help in incident resolution with the latest runbooks for engineers, provide transcripts from meetings or updated objection handling battle cards for sales teams, and generate SQL queries for sales ops.

“Dust helps these teams and others get those assistants up and running in minutes, tailored to their specific needs, and ready to be shared internally,” the company said in the post.

The Dust platform connects to a company’s data, wherever it lives, so that the AI assistants can leverage that data; allows companies to use any AI model, to avoid vendor lock-in; and keeps the data safe, according to the post.

One company that uses the platform, European business banking solution Qonto, said in the release that integrating Dust has enabled its entire team to test and deploy AI solutions while keeping customers’ data safe.

“Today, 75% of the team is using gen-AI power on a monthly basis, and we expect the entire company to be using AI assistants frequently by the end of the year,” Alexandre Prot, co-founder and CEO at Qonto, said in the release.

In another recent development in this space, Anthropic, the company behind the Claude AI assistant, said Tuesday (June 25) 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 that is a “banker-focused, conversational copilot tool” that provides portfolio management while streamlining tasks and helping banks track and comply with regulatory requirements.