After raising $24.5 million, Raleigh AI startup Pryon launches its first product
Raleigh entrepreneur Igor Jablokov made his name by selling his voice-recognition startup Yap to Amazon, helping fuel that company’s creation of the Alexa voice assistant.
Now, his newest venture — artificial intelligence startup Pryon — is building momentum for its own voice assistant.
Pryon launched its first commercialized AI product for companies this month after mainly dealing with prototypes in the past year. It already is piloting the product with several large banks, manufacturers and tech companies, Jablokov said in an interview with The News & Observer.
The company is building a virtual assistant platform that it hopes will be useful to business leaders. It can process large amounts of data — like documents, communications, web pages and other sources — and allow users to ask any sort of question about it.
Jablokov believes this could potentially make people more efficient in the office, especially if more people begin to work from home. Rather than having to message a colleague or spend time researching internal documents, a user could just ask Pryon and it would deliver an answer via text or voice.
Jablokov says companies are interested because most AI voice assistants only respond to a limited set of questions, and their search results are too weak. But Pryon could answer millions of questions, he said.
The platform can also be plugged into consumer websites or added into chatbots to improve their abilities as well.
“We’re in active trials with solidly dozens of companies, and they tend to be Fortune 500 companies,” Jablokov said.
Active trials
One of its first customers is Georgia-Pacific, an Atlanta-based manufacturer of paper and chemical products.
Georgia-Pacific is part of Engage Ventures, a venture capital firm backed by some of the biggest companies in the Atlanta area. The firm’s goal is to invest in companies whose innovations could help them.
Engage, whose backers include AT&T, Delta, Georgia-Pacific and Goldman Sachs, is an investor in Pryon.
Georgia-Pacific has been using Pryon to help supervisors keep track of safety protocols and information as they travel to and from manufacturing plants.
“Pryon’s AI technology helped us find a better solution to automate and improve accuracy with our safety help desk function,” Tony Egl, senior director of information technology at Georgia-Pacific, said in a statement. “We continue to look for ways to innovate and improve our safety efforts. Implementing Pryon’s natural language platform makes it easier to access the appropriate safety knowledge when needed.”
Jablokov declined to name any other initial customers, many of which are in trial periods with the company. But he said some are using it to analyze large amounts of legal documents, sift through large amounts of financial documents about publicly-traded securities and improve their customer service chatbots.
Jablokov said Pryon will be focused on signing up new customers throughout the rest of the year and building out its team, which has offices on N.C. State University’s Centennial Campus.
He said companies are now more willing to consider artificially intelligent assistants than they were in the past. “It’s getting better,” he said. “Let’s put it this way: It’s not as bad as it was in, you know, 2006 before Siri.”
The company currently has 40 employees, up from the 20 it had in the fall of 2019.
Now that customers are starting to use the product, Jablokov said the company is likely to try and raise more money from investors this year. He acknowledged that some “people have started whispering in our ears” about the possibility of acquiring the startup.
“We are looking to take on a bit more capital,” he said. “It’s the right time to do so because we were able to prove this thing out. It’s working.”
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate
