Announcing our $6M seed funding round and the general availability of Mindy
Cuong Do, Yu Pan, Benoit Berthoux
Today, we are thrilled to announce that Mindy has secured funding from world-class investors Sequoia Capital (round led by managing partner Roelof Botha) and Founders Fund, and that we’re making Mindy generally available to all. This marks a significant milestone in our journey to build tools for people who want to harness the benefits of generative AI without having to become prompt engineers.
Why?
Generative AI gives students, workers and consumers a chance to become more productive by taking on mundane, repetitive tasks (e.g. searching, writing, organizing), ultimately, letting them focus on what matters most (e.g. higher value tasks at work or spending more time with family and friends).
However, we noticed our friends and family members try early generative AI tools, get excited, and rapidly give up on them, as they were not integrated into their daily workflows, not personalized, and sometimes too complicated to use.
We realized there was a significant opportunity to make generative AI more accessible to consumers and workers while helping them get more out of it.
Enter Mindy
Simple.
Mindy meets students, workers, and consumers where they are today, beginning with email. With a simple message to m@mindy.com, users can start interacting with Mindy, as they would with a friend or a colleague. No install is required, and no need to download yet another plugin. Not everyone wants to become a prompt engineer, and Mindy takes on the complex part of generative AI to let users enjoy the outcome.
Why start with email? Email is the original Internet technology and is still the most ubiquitous tool used to communicate in the business world. Allowing users to cc Mindy to schedule a meeting or forward Mindy a document for summarization, as they would with a colleague, delivers the value of generative AI without having to leave their day-to-day workflow or having to learn how to “prompt.” Over 4 billion people around the world have an email account, and it is also a formidable platform for distribution and spread.
Powerful.
Because email is asynchronous, it also allows us to do more for users than existing web-based AI tools. For example, Mindy can deep search on complex topics (e.g.: “Hi Mindy, please assemble a table with Coca Cola stock price and quarterly revenues, net income, and diluted EPS for every quarter of the past 3 years.”). Mindy's internet crawling and research capabilities go deep and efficiently scan open and closed data sources, returning well-informed, sourced results (including links) with next best action recommendations going far beyond most existing AI assistant tools. Mindy’s deep search can mean hours of time saved.
Trustworthy.
Users only share data that they are comfortable sharing. Mindy learns users’ context and preferences and earns their trust. We launched our open beta in November 2023, and thousands of users have already signed up, using Mindy every day to help with personal and professional tasks, including demand generation (searching for leads), writing emails, building resumes, creating social media content, searching for a birthday gift, and planning the next family trip vacation.
Mindy is driving outcomes every day for early adopters like Dan, the CEO of a Georgia-based defense and aerospace component business who rolled out the product to his executive team and insists that everyone addresses Mindy as a colleague, not as AI. Similarly, Mindy helped a UCLA student secure interviews for his dream internship.
Our Team
We are seasoned tech founders and executives who helped build world-class consumer and enterprise businesses at PayPal, YouTube, and Accenture. AI tech is transformational but it can also feel daunting and we are proud to build Mindy to level the playing-field and bring the power of AI to users in simple and human ways. We are now a Team of 10+, with amazing talent coming from world-class organizations like Google, Open AI, Mutiny, Instabase, Zoom, and help from our campus teams at UIUC and Berkeley/Edhec, and in case you were wondering, we are hiring!
We're just getting started
With Generative AI moving at lightspeed, this funding round gives us a chance to ship more value-oriented features, faster. We are also excited to roll out new ways to interact with Mindy, and further develop our own LLM infrastructure.
Try Mindy today by entering your email at https://mindy.com/. See you soon!
Mindy Founders
