Dust Secures $16M to Enhance Enterprise AI Assistants with Internal Data Integration

French Startup Dust Secures $16 Million Series A Funding Led by Sequoia Capital

French startup Dust has successfully raised a $16 million Series A funding round, spearheaded by Sequoia Capital. Dust empowers businesses to create tailored AI assistants that enhance employee productivity through easy sharing and collaboration.

What sets Dust apart from other companies in the enterprise AI space is its unique approach to AI assistants. Unlike consumer-oriented tools like ChatGPT, Dust's assistants are intricately linked to a company's internal data and documents. For example, when creating a new assistant, users can integrate it with resources from Notion, Google Drive, Intercom, or Slack.

Moreover, unlike many enterprises focused on developing single AI agents, Dust advocates for businesses to utilize multiple AI assistants—each tailored to address specific tasks and challenges faced by various teams. For instance, support teams can leverage a Dust assistant that is familiar with their knowledge base and previous support interactions. This allows new members to efficiently ask the @supportExpert assistant questions and receive informed responses.

In the human resources sector, teams can design an AI assistant that promptly answers queries about corporate policies—eliminating the need to sift through complex Notion databases. Additionally, they can create another assistant to draft job descriptions based on prior examples, thereby enhancing productivity and allowing HR teams to focus on strategic tasks.

For engineering and data teams, the opportunities are clear. A Dust assistant can have access to the company’s database schemas, enabling straightforward requests. For example, users can simply ask @SQLbuddy in plain language to generate a SQL query relevant to their customer base.

Sales teams can also benefit by crafting draft emails drawn from CRM data, contextualizing communication with prospective clients. For organizations needing to establish their own connectors or integrate Dust assistants into other applications, the startup offers a robust API.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, Dust aims to provide a solution that caters to diverse business needs. Since the debut of ChatGPT, familiarity with AI assistants has soared, making it easier for employees to engage in dialogue, provide detailed requests, and seek refined answers from AI systems.

Using Dust is similarly straightforward; employees can access the platform via its web interface or seamlessly interact with assistants within Slack. This allows for smooth @-mentions during conversations, effectively transforming generative AI into a daily internal communication tool.

Currently, Dust boasts an annual recurring revenue of $1 million, with several prominent tech companies like Watershed, Alan, Qonto, Pennylane, and PayFit extensively utilizing the platform.

Qonto, a business banking startup, reports that 75% of its 1,600-strong team consistently uses Dust assistants each month. Alan, a leading French health insurance unicorn, sees 80% of its employees engaging with AI assistants weekly. Accounting tech unicorn Pennylane has developed an impressive 86 custom assistants using Dust.

In addition to the backing from Sequoia Capital, Dust's existing investors—including XYZ, GG1, Connect Ventures, Seedcamp, and Motier Ventures—are also re-investing in the startup.

This customer-centric focus allows Dust to enable users to select their preferred foundation models without creating its own. When building an assistant, users can choose from various large language models, including options from OpenAI (GPT), Anthropic (Claude), Mistral, and Google’s Gemini models.

The landscape for enterprise AI agents is bustling, with notable startups like Brevian, Tektonic AI, Ema, Kore.ai, and Glean emerging in the sector. Even Atlassian, known for its flagship products Jira and Confluence, has entered the arena with its AI assistant, Rovo. It remains to be seen if Dust’s streamlined onboarding strategy will establish a successful market presence.

France Leads Generative AI Funding in Europe