Dust: Leveraging LLMs for Internal Company Knowledge to Make Work “Work Better” for Smart Teams
Work doesn’t work as well as it could. Dust, an AI-native platform built to augment human workflows is here to improve all our work days. Here at XYZ, we believe that the advent of generative AI will transform how work is done. This is the driving force behind our investment in Dust, who are leveraging LLM orchestration to strengthen collaboration and increase productivity across internal operations. Dust’s platform will quell the information chaos we frequently see, and help companies understand their environment faster - leading to what we all want: better, faster business decisions.
Early on, the Dust team identified an opportunity in our modern workflows that only recently could be solved by LLMs: software that works for complex human workflows and is tailored to our differences and needs. When we first met the Parisian-based founders Gabriel Hubert and Stanislas Polu through our close friend Diede van Lamoen, they had a powerfully articulated thesis to pursue: companies, teams, and individuals will need to consume and create knowledge in completely reimagined ways using models in order to endure as an enterprise.
We were particularly excited about their ability to articulate the opportunities that exist within the Wild West of the LLM landscape. Three recent innovations in generative AI have led to the conception of Dust. First, LLMs enable plain English text to function as a programming language to build software, empowering employees of any technical ability to iterate quickly. Second, LLMs allow for customization of both inputs and outputs (eg, “reading” and “writing”) of a given workflow at the individual user level, resulting in more efficient and effective collaboration. Finally, advancements in AI have enabled the software itself to perform much more poorly defined and complex tasks, allowing for the automation of even more lower-level operations.
Gabriel and Stan have a clear vision for LLMs' past, present, and future. Dust will focus on augmenting internal company data and workflows using LLMs and optimizing user experience in an AI-native application/product layer. Through Gabriel and Stan’s leadership at Stripe and Open AI, they have demonstrated the execution velocity, technical expertise, and knowledge of the space to bring better tools to business users and add efficiency to operations in an AI-first approach. We are doubling down on the progress we’ve seen with Dust’s OSS platform and the application layer they are building on top of it.
We continue to be impressed by the team’s singular focus on helping nontechnical users and enterprise developers maximize business outcomes in a safe environment. We believe in Dust’s contrarian mission - rather than following the cost-cutting pack, this AI platform is designed for the revenue generation opportunities that are created when you supercharge smart teams.
We could not be more excited to participate in Dust’s $5.5M seed round along with Sequoia Capital’s Seed Team, our close friend Diede at GG1, AIGrant, Connect Ventures, Motier VC, Remote First, Tiny Supercomputer, Seedcamp, and strategic angel investors to build on top of enterprise workflows to boost smart teams.
