GenAI may be one of the most exciting technologies today. But it’s also one of the fastest-moving — which poses a challenge for businesses looking to deploy it. With each new GenAI innovation, companies must worry not only about staying on top of trends, but also about validating what works while maintaining a semblance of accuracy, compliance, and security.
There is a whole group of startups adapting GenAI tools to suit business needs. Arcee, for example, builds solutions to help businesses safely train, benchmark and manage GenAI models, and Articul8 AI, an Intel spin-out, builds business software based on algorithms.
Now another young man is joining the crew.
Himank Jain, Atharva Padhye and Prabhat Singh are its co-founders Knot, which builds AI models that answer questions about business data in plain language according to OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Padhye explains it this way:
“With a simple natural language command, executives can get any report, insight, root cause analysis or forecast at their fingertips,” he said via email. “For example, marketers using Hubspot can ask a question like, ‘Why are my email campaigns to new users getting low conversions?’
Crux – which Jain, Padhye and Singh iterated through nearly 15 times before arriving at the platform’s current form – turns schema, the structure of databases, into a “semantic layer” that AI models can understand. Beyond that, Crux allows customers to tailor their question-answering models to their business intelligence needs, terms and policies, thereby improving the quality of results, according to Padhye.
Crux’s platform for building, customizing and developing business-focused GenAI models and tools.
Crux leverages a multi-model framework that breaks down questions asked by users into individual parts, distributing those parts to specialized, purpose-built models. For example, one model, which Padhye calls an “clarifying agent,” asks follow-up questions to get the user’s intent.
Crux is developed on-premise and does not use customer data to train the models, Padhye says.
“Crux aims to launch [an] AI decision engine for business,” Padhye said. “Crux is challenging existing business intelligence tools… by iterating faster and rethinking the analytics stack as a decision-making stack.”
Crux makes money by selling subscriptions plus setup and maintenance fees that depend on the type and size of a company’s deployment. It is proven to be a profitable model. Crux’s annual recurring revenue reached $240,000 in four months with a customer base of four companies, Padhye claims.
Crux aims to stay small for the foreseeable future, maxing out at around 20 people by the end of the year. But with $2.6 million in funding it recently raised from Emergent Ventures, Y Combinator and several angel backers, Crux plans to expand into the “upmarket,” Padhye said — focusing on acquiring new enterprise customers.
Added Anupam Rastogi of Emergent Ventures via email:
“BI and data analytics… is on the verge of a major transformation driven by big language models and advanced artificial intelligence. This field is poised for exponential growth over the next decade, moving from static dashboards and manual reporting to real-time, accurate and actionable on-demand information. Crux has developed a ground-breaking product in this space that helps its customers grow revenue quickly and is already attracting significant customer interest.”
