Dust accelerates fast-moving companies with teams of specialized assistants
Dust raises $16m in additional funding led by Sequoia and passes $1m ARR with 70% WAU/MAU on par with platforms like Slack.
Dust raises $16m in additional funding led by Sequoia and passes $1m ARR with 70% WAU/MAU.
Founded in February 2023, Dust’s mission is to get work to work better. Our platform lets teams design and deploy specialized AI assistants that have context on the company’s knowledge and use any of today’s leading models from providers like Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, or Mistral.
As a “genAI native” company, we believe in highly focused assistants that can act as practical tools, not just general-purpose question-answering gadgets. Recruiters want assistants to draft job descriptions or review candidate cover letters. Engineers need assistants that understand the company’s code base and architecture principles or that can help in incident resolution with the latest runbooks. Sales teams want to get personalized transcripts from meetings with links to the right Salesforce accounts or continuously updated objection handling battle cards. Sales ops need to generate SQL queries without depending on the analytics team.
Dust helps these teams and others get those assistants up and running in minutes, tailored to their specific needs, and ready to be shared internally.
At the same time, we believe in the value of a unified platform to manage costs, limit security dependencies, and accelerate value creation. Founders and Leadership teams can be concerned about approving too many verticalized solutions that could increase external security risk factors and also potentially perpetuate existing internal knowledge silos rather than breaking them down.
“One platform for all, but not one-size-fits-all assistants” has allowed us to see strong and sustained adoption at hundreds of fast-moving customers, including teams like Watershed, Alan, Qonto, and Pennylane. We've learned with our customers that a team of AI assistants excelling at specific tasks outperforms a single assistant attempting many tasks poorly. We've also found that a unified platform for designing and hosting these assistants accelerates company-wide deployment, spanning the numerous functions poised to benefit from generative AI's productivity gains.
70% of monthly active Dust users are active weekly, a figure that’s on par with amazing tools like Slack and underlines Dust’s ability to become a core part of recurring workflows.
There is so much more to do and we’re excited to accelerate! Today, we’re excited to announce that we’ve raised $16M in additional funding, led by Sequoia Capital and with participation from our other incredible investors such as XYZ, GG1, Connect Ventures, Seedcamp, and Motier Ventures to double down on product development efforts for Dust. For this, we’re hiring! Please visit our jobs page and reach out!
Some highlighted testimonials
Watershed
Watershed is the enterprise sustainability platform. Companies like Airbnb, Carlyle Group, FedEx, Visa, and Dr. Martens use Watershed to measure, report, and act on their emissions so they can produce audit-ready carbon footprints that drive real reductions.
We've been able to leverage AI assistants powered by Dust to supercharge our teams across the business. From helping extract data from long documents to building agents that help check processes for errors. Dust has democratized the ability for anyone on our team to quickly spin up AI agents to help them be more effective.
Avi Itskovich, Co-Founder at Watershed.
Qonto
Qonto, a leading European business banking solution supporting more than 450k companies, is one of Europe’s highest-valued growth companies.
At Qonto, we see significant potential in the use of AI technologies and machine learning, especially with the rise of generative AI. Integrating Dust has been key for us to provide more autonomy for our entire team to rapidly test and deploy solutions with immediate impact. As a regulated institution, our primary concern is (and will always be) the security and safety of our customers’ data.
We ensure that our 1,600-person team can leverage gen-AI safely in their day-to-day work, delegating time-intensive and low-value-added tasks to the machine, and ultimately delivering more value to our customers.
With Dust, we found a partner that helps us uphold both security and efficiency—and the results are promising so far. Today, 75% of the team is using gen-AI power on a monthly basis, and we expect the entire company to be using AI assistants frequently by the end of the year.
Alexandre Prot, Co-Founder and CEO at Qonto.
Helping teams build AI that actually works.
In the rest of this post, we’ll highlight the breadth of Dust's capabilities. Whether you are considering using Dust or just starting to explore the possibilities of AI, Dust helps solve the operational challenges that arise while deploying AI on internal use cases.
Dust is designed to leverage AI by allowing those who know their workflows best—teams doing that work today—to control the design of their AI assistants. Our platform makes it easy for anyone to build and deploy teams of AI assistants at scale.
Dust enables the creation of teams of specialized assistants. Companies deploying AI face the challenge of identifying solutions that work for them. Dust makes it easy to design and deploy AI assistants able to collaborate with teams to effectively handle some of their time-consuming tasks.
To each their own tools. AI assistants should help with complex workflows, not just simple tasks. Dust provides granular controls and visibility into a number of tools to give a broader scope to assistants while controlling their are safe and robust by limiting hallucinations, formatting errors, or the risk of infinite loops. Native tools include data analysis, semantic search on a selected data source, web navigation, and data extraction from unstructured streams of data. Dust’s own development platform also allows the creation of additional tools.
Platform- and model-agnostic
Dust provides a flexible, future-proof abstraction layer for AI investment on internal productivity topics, adapting to a company's evolving needs and to teams’ specific processes.
Dust connects to your data, no matter where it lives. Bringing in context from Google Drive, Notion, Slack, GitHub, Intercom, Confluence, Microsoft, or another tool through native connections or APIs enables assistants to leverage data across silos.
Dust allows you to use all frontier models. Dust enables teams to not depend on a single AI model provider by providing companies with access to Anthropic, OpenAI, Mistral, and Google Gemini models. Teams can avoid AI vendor lock-in and easily compare their performances on real use cases rather than with white paper rankings.
Secure by design
Dust is built for teams to adopt AI assistants while keeping data safe. Company Data and prompts are never used to train provider models. Dust is SOC2 Type II certified and compliant with the requirements of GDPR legislation.
The Road Ahead
We want Dust to be the most powerful platform for fast-moving teams excited to improve their work with usable AI assistants. There’s a long and exciting journey ahead to transform the way we work.
We are just getting started! To our users: thank you for your trust and feedback. To our investors: thank you for your trust in this exciting adventure.
Try Dust today and start building your own team of AI assistants. We’d love to have you on board!
The Team at Dust