Bounti has come out of stealth and announced it raised $16 million in seed funding for its artificial intelligence (AI) teammate platform for sales, marketing and customer success teams.
The company’s platform is designed to perform repetitive, non-revenue generating work that would otherwise be done by these teams, allowing them to focus on customer relationships, Bounti said in a Thursday (Sept. 12) press release.
“At Bounti, we’re creating technology that empowers sales, marketing and customer success teams to focus on meaningful human work, and this investment shows that our vision is one that the industry believes in,” Matt Cooley, co-founder of Bounti, said in the release.
Bounti’s approach is to combine the capabilities of software with those of “real, trained humans” to accelerate companies’ revenue goals, Ashar Rizqi, co-founder of Bounti, said in the release.
“We will use our funding to invest aggressively in expanding capabilities across both the software platform and human-in-the-loop services component,” Rizqi said.
The company’s first AI teammate specializes in prospecting, according to the release. It researches companies, identifies buyers and generates personalized emails.
Because of Bounti’s belief that humans must be involved in the outreach, the AI teammate delivers this information to a company’s sales rep rather than simply automating the mass delivery of emails, the release said.
This approach saves time for the sales team, provides up-to-the-minute research and enables sales reps to get the conversations started more quickly, per the release.
Bounti’s seed round was led by Google Ventures, according to the release.
“We share Bounti’s vision that AI will transform knowledge work as we know it, and we’re excited to support the team as they bring real AI-driven value to go-to-market teams,” Sangeen Zeb, general partner at Google Ventures, said in the release.
While generative AI is expanding workers’ capabilities, experts warn that human oversight remains crucial to ensure quality and avoid pitfalls, PYMNTS reported Monday (Sept. 9).
Experts recommend a balanced approach to harness AI’s potential while mitigating risks.
At consumer and retail companies, 57% of marketing and sales teams are actively pursuing generative AI initiatives, according to the PYMNTS Intelligence and AI-ID collaboration, “What Generative AI Has in Store for the Retail Industry.”
For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.
An antitrust probe of Microsoft that was launched in the last days of the Biden administration will reportedly continue under the Trump administration.
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) staff have continued gathering information for the investigation, Bloomberg reported Wednesday (March 12), citing unnamed sources.
Neither the FTC nor Microsoft immediately replied to PYMNTS’ request for comment.
According to the Bloomberg report, the FTC sent Microsoft a civil investigative demand late last year demanding information about the company’s artificial intelligence (AI) operations, data centers, software licensing practices and decision to cut funding on its own AI projects after making a deal with OpenAI.
One company that was asked for information as part of the investigation told Bloomberg that the FTC wants to determine whether Microsoft has an edge over other AI companies because of the profits it earns from other parts of the business, per the report.
The FTC’s questions about the company’s software licensing practices may relate to competitors’ complaints about Microsoft bundling its office productivity, security software and cloud offerings, which makes it harder for them to compete, according to the report.
Microsoft’s decision to cancel some of its own work on AI after investing in OpenAI and using that company’s software is also under scrutiny by the FTC because that move may have reduced competition in the field, per the report.
Wide-ranging antitrust investigations like the one targeting Microsoft can take years and don’t always result in a case brought by the FTC, the report said.
Microsoft spokesmen Alex Haurek said in the report: “We are working cooperatively with the agency.”
It was reported in November that the FTC was set to investigate allegedly anticompetitive practices at Microsoft’s cloud computing business, focusing on allegations that the tech giant illegally uses the market power of its Office 365 productivity software to benefit its Azure cloud service.
In December, it was reported that Microsoft formally requested an investigation into the FTC after reports surfaced that details of the antitrust investigation were leaked. The company asked the regulator’s inspector general to examine whether senior management at the agency disclosed nonpublic information about the probe.