About the time that Floworks co-founders Sudipta Biswas and Sarthak Shrivastava were starting at Y Combinator in the Winter 23 cohort, they had a chat with veteran investor Vinod Khosla, who encouraged the pair to think bigger. They said that that conversation had a huge influence on them as they were building Floworks, an AI assistant designed to help complete mundane enterprise tasks.
Today, the company announced a $1.5 million seed investment.
“Fundamentally, our product is an AI assistant, which can interact with different software products that knowledge workers use daily, such as Gmail, Google Calendar or Salesforce, and you can simply instruct these products in plain natural language to get your stuff done,” Biswas told TechCrunch. The focus is on using AI to enhance the worker experience, rather than replace employees.
For starters, they are mostly concentrating on sales use cases, while supporting a handful of applications including HubSpot and Salesforce along with Google Docs, Google Calendar and Gmail, but the goal is to add more integrations over time and include workers in operations, product and other areas of a company.
Users start by opening the Floworks web app and signing into any applications they want to work with. After they have signed into the desired applications, they can access the Floworks assistant in Slack, then use plain language to describe what they want to do, such as put a new contact in the CRM database, add a calendar invite to the calendar application and send out an introductory email.
Each action triggers an approval, and if the bot needs additional information or clarification, it will request it as part of a conversation in Slack, as Floworks takes on the role of helpful assistant. They are also aiming to add support for Microsoft Teams in the future.
Image Credits: Floworks
They have working beta today with paying customers and report ARR close to $250,000, according to the founders. They plan to expand revenue possibilities by working with channel partners in the future. The two co-founders say that they hope to defend the idea against large company encroachment by being an assistant that can eventually work with just about any application you can log into through their web app. “Where we differentiate ourselves is that our product allows interoperability across multiple applications,” Biswas said, and he believes this will separate them from larger companies focused on their own product families.
Floworks currently has 11 employees with locations in San Francisco and Bangalore, India, and the two founders see building a diverse workforce as key to building a successful product.
“We think diversity is the key to having a product that we are trying to build. So when we look at the vision of our product, it is to literally change how the world has been using software since the age of software was started. And that means that everyone in this world has to be part of this solution, and by that we just don’t mean people who are coming and working with us, but we also mean by partners who are working with us,” Shrivastava said.
Today’s $1.5 million seed round was led by Y Combinator and Sense AI with participation from Gaingels, Entrepreneur First and ThinKuvate. The funding closed in May.