Endless Meetings No More: Akooda's $11M AI Revolution

0:00Today on the podcast, we are going to be talking about Acuda, a company that has just raised$11 million and is using AI to help companies out. So let's jump into it. I think the big challenges of really maintaining a seamless operational flow when you're growing a company has prompted a lot of people to rely on some really, I mean, essentially hire some meetings. They're using these as an attempt to really navigate internal dynamics. And so there is a new company called Okuda, and it is planning to disrupt this pattern. They're introducing an AI to analyze a company's internal software stack. So whatever you're using for your software, they're then going to get a lot of data and understanding on your organization's inner mechanics, and they're going to be leveraging that.

0:46Actually, I think this is pretty crazy because when we're talking about them gathering data on your company, this thing actually goes pretty in-depth. What they're actually looking at is they're gonna be looking at the entire public digital footprint of an organization They're looking through the public slack messages confluence documentation code pieces Salesforce and HubSpot sale entries They're looking at their JIRA tickets and other areas where organizational knowledge is generated So anywhere in the organization where they're generating content and you know any sort of organizational knowledge They're gonna be skimming all of this and this they're doing essentially to eliminate the need for endless meetings and redundant reporting by really providing a very seamless ChadGPT-like experience for anyone that has any questions about the organization.

1:29So Akuta's technology is more nuanced than it appears, I think. And so while the company, they do use large language models to kind of discern the complexities of an organization, I think it does steer clear of using a company's private data to train these models, which is really important. This is what they actually said about it. They said, We adopt statistical modeling and analysis to examine the customer's unique lexicon, what we term as the company's rare words, such as acronyms, project names, and customer names. That's what their CEO said. And this, I think, really kind of allows them to build a more personalized software for each company and industry, regardless of the explicit data training.

2:12I think that this is a really cool piece of software. I don't think they're going to stop at simply answering questions about a company, though. From what I understand, doing a little research on them, I believe that in the future, Acuda plans to integrate an anomaly detection engine capable of flagging potential issues in an automated fashion, which I think is really interesting. And I think that this means that anomalies like low revenue, a low revenue customer, consuming excessive internal resources or something like that, or any of those kind of situations would be brought to the attention of management without you really having a human have to go in there and ask questions and figure out and you know prompt it for those i think this is a really cool concept when it comes to integrating ai with technology giving an ai like the entirety of all the data all the historical data all the reporting and yeah really any data that you can get on your company and having it do like a company health check a company help scores and really know where your company is at.

3:16Maybe they're like, hey, you just released a new version of your software and you're having a ton more JIRA tickets or hey, you know, your revenue in this particular department has been dipping quite severe or hey, the spending over in this department is getting out of control. There's so many really interesting things. I think of course, we have reporting tools and software and all sorts of, you know, all sorts of things for but i think it's really cool having sort of this all-encompassing ai that could look at an organization and give you uh reporting based off of what's happening and give you recommendations on how you can improve and how you can streamline your organization and build better so i think this is a really cool tool i'm excited for akuda and for what they're building their ceo recently notes their ceo is gone karowski and they noted that the implementation of this technology doesn't obviously eradicate the role of humans in decision making but they do say that this really kind of enhances the quality of information they base their decisions on so they said quote the role of the human in the loop isn't going to change we remain the conscientious decision makers however the ways we collect data and surface actionable insights will fundamentally transform the way we managed companies.

4:31I think Okuda currently has around 16 individuals that work at the company, and they're looking to fill a bunch of open roles. They're obviously growing very fast, especially with this new round of$11 million in funding they've just raised. And they attribute their great team to their hiring practices. I don't know why they made that comment. It's kind of funny. In any case, Gonkowoski has managed teams throughout his career, and he views kind of building a really solid team as something that happens from solid recruitment. So he's really focused about that. He stated, there is a very simple way to do that.

5:11You hire the best and you give everyone a fair chance and then it just happens. And that's my leadership approach. In any case, I think Akuda has really attracted participants in an initiative in Israel to hire Russian and Ukrainian immigrants. Garak Woski holds this initiative close to his heart saying, quote, this is an initiative that we took an active part in from day zero. It's something that we hold very near and dear to our hearts. I think the recent investment that is kind of pushing Akuta's ambitious vision right now is a collective effort from a few different entities. So they have NFX, they have Atlassian Ventures, they have Village Global, they have Founder Collective, and they have several other anonymous angel investors that are currently investing in this 11 million dollar round they've raised and i think this is really interesting i mean especially when you're looking at investors like elassian ventures who obviously is a very big software company in their own right and i think elassian can see the power and the implications of having a tool like akuda integrated into their own uh into their own company and perhaps they see this as a partnership or package they could offer to people that use their own software but really having something like this integrated that is looking through the software that you use looking at what you're doing and making recommendations for how you can improve different aspects of your business based off of kind of all of those connections so i think this really is when you're looking at strategic partnerships i think at last seen ventures is a great partner for them and i think it's going to be interesting um because this is kind of an area where essentially this ai is gathering all this data based off of its ability to interface with different software platforms so i think that's going to be a really big thing for them and so having a partner like elassian where you know elassian can build some great integrations i think is going to go a long way so this will be a very interesting company to continue to follow in the future and see how this begins to transform the landscape as far as companies becoming more effective using ai and automating that process