Ema, a ‘Universal AI employee,’ emerges from stealth with $25M
Generative AI well and truly has a grip on public technology discourse these days. A new startup called Ema out of San Francisco thinks it’s a lot more than just a passing fancy. It’s emerging from stealth today, with a product of the same name that it believes will open a new chapter in how AI, and specifically generative AI, will change how we work.
“Our goal is to build a universal AI employee,” Surojit Chatterjee, the CEO and co-founder, said in an interview. “Our goal is to automate on the mundane tasks that employees do on a day to day basis in every enterprise… to free them up to do more valuable and more strategic work.”
The company, and investors, are putting money and revenues where its mouth is: It’s already raised $25 million from an impressive list of backers, along with customers that it quietly amassed while still in stealth, to blow away any accusations of vaporware, including Envoy Global, TrueLayer and Moneyview.
As for what Ema can do, these businesses are using it in applications that range from customer service — including offering technical support to users as well as tracking and other functions — through to internal productivity applications for employees. Ema’s two products — Generative Workflow Engine (GWE) and EmaFusion — are designed to “emulate human responses” but also evolve with more usage with feedback.
As Chatterjee describes it, it’s not just robotic process automation (that is so 2010’s) and it’s not just AI to accelerate certain tasks (that’s going back even further), and it’s not just another GenAI accuracy fail waiting to be lampooned on social media.
Chatterjee says that Ema — which is an acronym for “enterprise machine assistant” — taps into more than 30 large language models, he said, and combines that with its own “smaller, domain specific models” in a patent-pending platform “to address all the issues you have seen with accuracy, hallucination, data protection and so on.”
This early round is adding a lot of names to Ema’s cap table. Accel, Section 32 and Prosus Ventures are co-leading, and Wipro Ventures, Venture Highway, AME Cloud Ventures, Frontier Ventures, Maum Group and Firebolt Ventures are also participating. On top of this there are also some big-name individual backers: Sheryl Sandberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Jerry Yang, Divesh Makan and David Baszucki among them.
“Our goal is to build a universal AI employee,” Surojit Chatterjee, the CEO and co-founder, said in an interview. “Our goal is to automate on the mundane tasks that employees do on a day to day basis in every enterprise… to free them up to do more valuable and more strategic work.”
The company, and investors, are putting money and revenues where its mouth is: It’s already raised $25 million from an impressive list of backers, along with customers that it quietly amassed while still in stealth, to blow away any accusations of vaporware, including Envoy Global, TrueLayer and Moneyview.
As for what Ema can do, these businesses are using it in applications that range from customer service — including offering technical support to users as well as tracking and other functions — through to internal productivity applications for employees. Ema’s two products — Generative Workflow Engine (GWE) and EmaFusion — are designed to “emulate human responses” but also evolve with more usage with feedback.
As Chatterjee describes it, it’s not just robotic process automation (that is so 2010’s) and it’s not just AI to accelerate certain tasks (that’s going back even further), and it’s not just another GenAI accuracy fail waiting to be lampooned on social media.
Chatterjee says that Ema — which is an acronym for “enterprise machine assistant” — taps into more than 30 large language models, he said, and combines that with its own “smaller, domain specific models” in a patent-pending platform “to address all the issues you have seen with accuracy, hallucination, data protection and so on.”
This early round is adding a lot of names to Ema’s cap table. Accel, Section 32 and Prosus Ventures are co-leading, and Wipro Ventures, Venture Highway, AME Cloud Ventures, Frontier Ventures, Maum Group and Firebolt Ventures are also participating. On top of this there are also some big-name individual backers: Sheryl Sandberg, Dustin Moskovitz, Jerry Yang, Divesh Makan and David Baszucki among them.
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