Two former executives of Humane, the ousted AI hardware startup, have resurfaced with a new artificial intelligence software venture that has raised $4 million on a $25 million valuation.
Brooke Hartley Moy and Ken Kocienda, Humane’s former head of strategic partnerships and head of product engineering, respectively, debuted Infactory, an AI fact-checking search engine. The pair left Humane in May, a few weeks after AI Pin’s lukewarm debut.
The Infactory tool aims to search the company’s own database, as well as the open web, in a transparent and explainable way, Kocienda told CNBC. He and Hartley Moy market startups to corporate customers in industries like finance, insurance, SaaS, healthcare and media.
“It really comes down to the opportunities we see on the home company side,” Hartley Moy, CEO of Infactory, told CNBC. “Building a product like this wouldn’t suit a consumer hardware company.”
When Humane sent its AI Pin to gadget reviewers in April, it received a mixed reception, with many calling it unreliable and not very useful. But both departures were related to business opportunities they saw while working at Humane, Hartley Moy said.
“The fact that this has been going on for a while, has nothing to do with the reviews and how things turned out,” he said.
Humane is now looking for a buyer, and in June, it was in talks with HP and other companies, including more than one telecom company, sources familiar with the matter told CNBC at the time. Last year, Humane raised $100 million in funding from Microsoft, LG’s venture arm and Tiger Global before announcing the device, bringing its total funding to more than $200 million. Backers include OpenAI CEO Sam Altman and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff.
Hartley Moy works on Salesforce, Slack and Google before leaving for Humane. There, he focused on software partnerships with cloud providers. Kocienda, Infactory’s CTO, works in Apple for over 15 years and was the lead engineer who invented keyboard auto-correction for the original iPhone.
The company’s seed round was led by Bee Partners with participation from Andreessen Horowitz and others. Although the majority of funding comes from institutional investors, Hartley Moy points out that Infactory also uses small special purpose vehicles, or SPVs, which are a type of funding commonly used by AI companies, such as Anthropic and Cohere.
AI chatbot ‘fact-focused’
Infactory is currently in alpha status, and the team is currently working with design partners and others to incorporate feedback before launching the product later this year, Hartley Moy said.
“There are many, many businesses that are not part of the original AI companies … that want to participate in this ecosystem,” he said. “The business requirements are very regulated in terms of accuracy, in terms of trust, in terms of high-quality answers. The standards for building these applications are just higher.”
How Infactory solves this problem is a special way to prepare data in a way that AI models can analyze better and more accurately, said Hartley Moy.
If, for example, a doctor has a patient in his office who is taking three different drugs, and the doctor wants to double-check potential drug interactions before prescribing the fourth drug, he can ask Infactory and it can provide the answer from internal data. , citing the source, Kocienda said.
“The answer must be correct, and the information is in the data that this company creates,” he said.
In the age of databases, web and mobile applications, the data that is currently out there is not well-primed for natural language models, Kocienda said. Infactory focuses on using AI to study company data, understand what’s in the semantics and measure the types of questions it can answer based on that data and refuse to answer if it can’t, instead of creating it, he said. . It’s something many AI chatbots struggle with.
For example, if a customer asks how many three-point shots Shohei Ohtani has made this season, the Infactory tool can answer that because Ohtani is a baseball player, the question does not make sense.
Google, Microsoft, OpenAI and other companies are leading the generative AI arms race as companies in all industries rush to add AI-powered chatbots and agents powered by big language models. The market is predicted to reach $1 trillion in revenue within ten years.
Many major chatbots have been criticized for generating inaccurate answers in response to user queries. Almost immediately after Google debuted “AI Summary” in Google Search, for example, public criticism mounted after queries returned unreasonable or inaccurate results to the AI feature, with no way to opt out.
With Infactory, “there’s no black box where questions go into the LLM and the answers come out and you don’t know where they’re coming from,” Kocienda said.
WATCH: Former Apple designer launches $700 Humane AI Pin as smartphone replacement
