Today, we are excited to announce that Zylon, the AI collaborator for every workplace, emerges from stealth with our $3.2M Pre-Seed founding round led by Felicis, with participation from LifeX Ventures and Zypsy, as well as other strategic angels like Travis McPeak co-founder of Resourcely, Kirill Tashilov entrepreneur and experienced VC, and Hans-Christian Zappel co-founder of IMMO.

What brought us here?

Zylon was founded in the second half of 2023 by Iván and myself as a natural reaction to the mindset we developed during the creation of PrivateGPT, an open-source project launched on May 2023 followed nowadays by more than 47,000 people on GitHub. PrivateGPT provides a complete framework containing all the building blocks required to build private, context-aware GenAI applications.

During its development, it was clear for us that PrivateGPT was just covering a gap for developers, whereas end-users were still lacking a product in the current Generative AI (GenAI) market that applied a proper working-backwards-from-the-customer vision.

Furthermore, given our experience using GenAI tools like ChatGPT in B2B spaces like OnTruck (where Iván was its CTO) and Amazon Business (where I was leading the Delivery Experience engineering team), we realized that the available “products” were not a good fit for Small and Midsize Businesses (SMBs) because of three main reasons:

1. They are afraid of leaking data to 3rd parties without a proper level of security and control, as well as allowing others to use their data to train LLMs.

2. They generally lack the tech skills and resources to be trained in prompt engineering skills, much less to integrate their systems with AI frameworks that expose in a very raw way the complexities of the technology behind AI.

3. The insights generated by a chat-based user interface are difficult to maintain and leverage in the long-term despite generating a great wow effect first-hand. This kind of user experience is not a good fit for a professional working environment where tools require reproducible interactions (click-driven vs chat) and clear data flows (edit, publish, etc.).

Motivated by these necessities, Zylon was born to create a high class, easy to use product for every workplace in which AI wouldn’t feel like magic, but instead would provide a consistent and explicit set of features not requiring tech or prompt engineering skills to be used, while keeping company data 100% private and secured.

What sets Zylon apart?

According to the McKinsey State of AI in 2023 Global Survey, 14% of technological industries have a regular usage of GenAI for work, while others like financial, healthcare or legal, reach only 5-8%. There is a clear opportunity to bring adoption of AI in non-tech industries, but having data leakage to 3rd-parties using it to train AI systems is a real fear.

During our customer discovery process involving more than 50 interviews with different kind of company roles, a constant pain we found was that they invest too much time in manual and repetitive tasks, as well as being overloaded with work related to analyzing different data sources to generate reports and take decisions. They don't know how to leverage AI to solve their problems despite having the feeling that it could help them. They also claimed that, by removing or minimizing the aforementioned challenge, they could work on what really makes the difference in their domain, bringing as a result additional value to their business.

To cover these necessities, Zylon sets itself apart from others in the market by abstracting the complexities of the technology and proposing a novel usability where actions like query company data, summarization or report generation are executed with just a few clicks and simple instructions. Privacy has been considered since inception by leveraging PrivateGPT tech, thus allowing customers to have full control over their data in a SOC2-certified SaaS environment with the possibility of a full on-premise setup for enterprises that require extreme privacy

Zylon brings a unique interaction in the GenAI field by understanding the “what, when and why” behind the needs of every business to proactively execute tasks without explicit user input, expanding the frontiers of what customers can expect. Additionally, Zylon is the first Collaborative GenAI tool in the market, allowing companies to gather their teams to work together in shared projects designed to foster collaboration and creativity around different company data sources. All of this is done with a B2B mindset in which the product is business ready by providing contextualized roles, permissions and analytics.

What’s next?

For us this is just the beginning: our roadmap is long and ambitious. With a lean mindset and determined to follow an exhaustive product development process to build the AI product that companies really need, we plan to iterate towards product-market fit, expanding from a horizontal solution to vertical adaptations for different industries, as well as including integrations with data sources beyond company documents like databases, online data repositories and the Internet.

To accomplish it, we are opening a Beta Program to have exclusive access to experience our cutting-edge AI product firsthand. By gathering your invaluable insights, we will refine our product before opening it to a broader audience.

The support of our open-source community and the learnings gathered from all the conversations we have had with potential costumers so far have led us to this stage. PrivateGPT is stronger than ever nowadays (47K+ stars on GitHub and 2.6K members in our Discord) and we are relentlessly incorporating new features to it thanks to the experience we are obtaining while building Zylon.

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Keeping all the aforementioned in mind, we are thrilled about playing a key role on bringing AI to all kind of businesses and we invite you to be part of changing the workspace paradigm.

Read more details in the VentureBeat exclusive press release.

Daniel Gallego Vico, Co-Founder & CPTO