Capacity (formerly Jane.ai), a startup developing a platform that indexes data from apps, teams, and more and enables users to search through the corpus using natural language, today revealed that it recently raised $13.2 million in series B funding from undisclosed Midwest angel and private investors. The influx of capital brings the company’s total raised to over $20 million, following an $8.4 million series A round in June 2018.
“We created Capacity to help everyday workers be more successful by eliminating the wasted time and effort that comes from searching for basic workplace information,” said Capacity cofounder and CEO David Karandish, formerly the CEO of Answers.com. “We’ve all grown accustomed to the convenience of on-demand, personalized services and voice-controlled speakers at home, but we have yet to benefit from these same conveniences at work. [Capacity] is an intuitive, intelligent AI-powered Teammate who gives employees instant access to the information they need to do their jobs well.”
Capacity is a service in two parts. Its cloud backend mines information from documents; webpages; email and calendar apps like Gmail and Exchange; customer relationship management (CRM) software like Salesforce and Oracle’s NetSuite; health information and resource services (HRIS) like ADP and Sage; service desk platforms like Zendesk and ServiceNow; and cloud drive providers like Box and OneDrive. The second part is a chatbot with natural language processing capabilities that integrates with popular messaging apps such as Slack and Skype. With Capacity, users can type things like “I need the Centene contract from August 2017” and “How much PTO do I have?” or even instruct it to schedule appointments (“Schedule 15 minutes to meet with David and Josh”) and update the status of sales leads (“Update the status of the Express Scripts deal to ‘won'”).
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It’s customizable, too. Capacity can deliver company-wide announcements, like daily news and event notifications, and onboard new hires by providing access to forms that need to be completed. For customers with websites that have FAQ sections, it can be made public-facing to help cut down on customer service requests.
Arguably the real value of Capacity is its ability to improve over time, according to Karandish, thanks to its CoPilot and Expert Finder features. When the chatbot doesn’t know the answer to something, it flags that item for a team member to review and stores it in a database. Additionally, if the answer is a bit more complex than can be communicated in a few sentences, Capacity creates a detailed conversational workflow informed by expert human knowledge.
Capacity was founded in St. Louis, Missouri in 2017 by Karandish and cofounder Chris Sims. Customers include Washington University in St. Louis, electric utility company Ameren Corporation, USA Mortgage, and Kelly Mitchel, Newell Brands, West Community Credit Union, Total Access Urgent Care, Maryville University, Framecad, EXL, and Schaeffer’s Oil.
