Seattle-based Augment is spinning out of the Allen Institute for AI incubator with a $3.45 million seed round.
Jordan Ritter, previously a co-founder of Napster, is the co-founder and CEO of Augment. The company's website is vague on details about what the startup does but says it offers "AI that's here to help supercharge your productivity."
“With Augment, the four-day work week may actually be within reach," Ritter said in a news release. "The devices and apps we use daily know so much about us, yet they don’t do much with that knowledge, and we’re forced to repeat the same tasks day in and day out. Augment will supercharge our productivity and enable us to finally free ourselves from the minutiae.”
Augment's website says the company is currently in stealth mode but plans to launch a public beta. Those interested can sign up for the startup's wait list.
Flying Fish Partners and Jazz Venture Partners invested in the seed round. Flying Fish's portfolio includes the conversational AI startup Finn AI and the data science startup YData.
Shu Wu, Daniel Cintra and Saurav Pahadia round out Augment's founding team. Wu, a Microsoft and Facebook veteran, is head of engineering. Cintra, Augment's head of product, spent more than six years at Google and more than four years at Axon, according to his LinkedIn page. Pahadia, an engineer at Augment, was formerly an engineer at Madrona Venture Labs.
“We have been talking with the all-star team at Augment for several months while they have been working within (The Allen Institute for AI)," Geoff Harris, managing partner at Flying Fish, said in a news release. "What became clear is that we have a shared vision for where artificial intelligence and machine learning can assist us all to be more productive and spend more time on the things that matter."
The Allen Institute for AI has spun out multiple growing startups in Seattle, including the artificial intelligence company WhyLabs and the voice-technology company WellSaid Labs. WhyLabs raised $10 million in November, while WellSaid Labs raised $10 million in July.
