Dust Raises $16 Million for Its Enterprise AI Assistants Connected to Internal Data

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French startup Dust has secured a $16 million Series A funding round led by Sequoia Capital. The company's platform enables businesses to create custom AI assistants and share them with their employees to enhance productivity.

What sets Dust apart from other companies working on enterprise agents or AI assistants is its unique approach. Unlike consumer-facing tools like ChatGPT, Dust assistants are connected to a company's internal data and documents. For instance, when building a new assistant in Dust, users can associate it with Notion pages, documents stored in Google Drive, Intercom conversations, or Slack.

Dust also believes that companies should have multiple AI assistants, each designed to perform specific tasks and solve common problems faced by different teams. For example, support teams can use a Dust assistant that is aware of both the content of the knowledge base and past support interactions. This way, new team members can ask a question to the @supportExpert assistant and receive a relevant answer.

HR teams can create an AI assistant that can answer questions about corporate policies, eliminating the need to search through a convoluted Notion database. They can also create a different agent that can draft job descriptions based on past job descriptions, freeing up time for the HR team.

For engineering and data teams, the use cases are straightforward. For example, a Dust assistant can be aware of the company's database schemas, allowing users to ask @SQLbuddy in plain English to write a SQL query on their customer base.

Another example is sales teams, which can generate draft emails based on CRM data and the general context behind a potential client. If needed, users can create their own connectors or integrate Dust assistants with other tools using the company's API.

Instead of reinventing the wheel, Dust focuses on building a product that works for everyone. With the familiarity of AI assistants, employees can easily interact with Dust's web interface or use assistants in Slack directly, allowing them to be @-mentioned in the middle of a conversation. Dust aims to turn generative AI into an internal communication tool that everyone uses daily.

The startup now generates $1 million in annual recurring revenue, with several late-stage tech companies using it intensively, such as Watershed, Alan, Qonto, Pennylane, and PayFit.

Business banking startup Qonto estimates that 75% of its team of 1,600 are using Dust assistants on a monthly basis. At Alan, a French health insurance unicorn, 80% of the company uses AI assistants on a weekly basis. Accounting tech unicorn Pennylane has created 86 custom assistants with Dust.

In addition to Sequoia Capital, some of the startup's existing investors are investing once again, including XYZ, GG1, Connect Ventures, Seedcamp, and Motier Ventures.

Dust's customer-focused approach means it isn't creating its own foundation model. When building an assistant, users can pick the large language model they want to use for that assistant. Dust has integrations with OpenAI (GPT), Anthropic (Claude), Mistral, and Google for its Gemini models.

There are several startups working on enterprise platforms for building AI agents, including Brevian, Tektonic AI, Ema, Kore.ai, and Glean. Even Atlassian, the enterprise software giant behind Jira and Confluence, has launched its AI teammate Rovo. It remains to be seen if Dust has found the right go-to-market method with its easy onboarding strategy.