Last year, OpenAI announced the OpenAI Startup Fund, through which it and its partners, including Microsoft, are investing in early-stage AI companies to solve major problems. Mum is the word from which companies they received funds. But today, the OpenAI Startup Fund announced that it has led a $23.5 million investment in Meme, a task-focused app that taps AI to automatically organize notes.
The investment values Mem at $110 million post-funding and brings the startup’s total revenue to $29 million.
Co-founded by Kevin Moody and Dennis Shue, Meme differentiates itself from traditional notebooks by emphasizing “lightweight organization,” in Moody and Shue’s words. The workflow is focused on search and chronological order, allowing users to attach topic tags, tag other users, and add recurring reminders to notes.
Meme users can take quick notes, send links and save images from anywhere using SMS, messaging apps and the platform’s mobile client. Collaboration features allow teams to share, edit, and comment on notes, and quickly link them to shared calendars for reference.
The meme search experience uses AI to search through memes, hoping to understand which memes are most relevant to a particular person. Moody and Xu’s platform is designed to augment knowledge workers in their usual responsibilities by reading pages of data, extracting parts relevant to a specific question, and turning that data into an answer or report.
Meme taps AI to organize notes instantly.
There is no doubt that tasks that require knowledge take time. According to Gartner, professionals spend 50% of their working hours searching for information and take an average of 18 minutes to find a file (although the validity of such metrics has come under challenge over the years). One source estimated that document disorganization costs businesses $3,900 in lost productivity each year, making the meme an attractive proposition if tech is in advertising.
The number one thing we hear from the organizations we talk to is a desire to leverage their extensive proprietary knowledge to support issues with … generative AI models – from research to writing to selling and beyond. Moody and Xu told TechCrunch in an email interview. “The magic of Mem is that we bring together your own personal and proprietary data with modern generative language models to unlock truly personalized and real results. We combine knowledge sources at the individual, team and organizational levels to enable significantly better performance across the board.”
Memes recently launched Meme It for Twitter, which allows users to save threads, get AI-generated summaries of their content, and see suggestions for similar tweets. It continues to refine MemeX with new features like Smart Write and Smart Edit, which allow AI to generate text on demand, include files, extract headers from documents, and allow users to use natural language commands. To edit or format text.
Meme AI-Powered Writing Tools Launching Soon in Preview
The plan for the future is to increase these types of AI-powered experiences, say Moody and Xu, with support from OpenAI through the OpenAI Startup Fund. In addition to capital, OpenAI Startup Fund participants also get early access to new OpenAI systems and Azure resources from Microsoft.
“OpenAI is clearly leading the wave of technological revolutions we’re riding,” Moody and Xu said.
OpenAI COO Brad Lightcup, who manages the OpenAI Startup Fund, said in an emailed statement: “Mem uses powerful AI to streamline knowledge workers’ organization and eliminate data access, ultimately allowing people to focus on the parts. It is important for their work. Their vision aligns perfectly with our goal at the OpenAI Startup Fund to use AI to improve companies’ productivity and, more broadly, human potential.
Mem competes with many other companies that want to tackle the same knowledge-finding and memory-organizing challenges. In enterprise search, there’s Glynn, which recently raised $100 million in a venture equity round. On the knowledge management side, Atlassian’s wiki-like collaborative workspace Confluence and Notion still dominate.
But Moody and Xu argue that the 16-person meme has the advantage of being “self-organized,” ostensibly reducing manual processing and labor. While they declined to disclose Meme’s revenue or the names of its top customers, they confirmed that Meme has been successful with its AI-driven technology.
“We are confident in our unique approach to organizing ourselves and generating knowledge. …Our personalized machine learning models don’t just help knowledge workers stay organized and stay organized automatically, but beyond helping them find things — we’re actually helping people do their jobs, Moody and Xu said. “The shift to remote work has made effective, asynchronous knowledge sharing more important than ever, and the slowdown in the market has forced companies to focus on efficiency. Our AI-powered knowledge work saves people time, and the rapid development of large language models gives us an additional tailwind.”
