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As enterprises look at how they can best leverage AI to increase their employees’ productivity, search is an obvious use case. In most companies, after all, data lives in multiple disconnected silos and the combination of large language models, retrieval augmented generation (RAG) and enterprise-grade integration services now makes it easier than ever to not just enable search but also create tools that can answer more complex questions about all of this data. It’s no surprise then that there are quite a few startups and incumbents (think Atlassian’s Rovo, for example), that are vying for this market. One of the newest entrants is Doti AI, a Tel Aviv-based startup that announced a $7 million seed funding round today.
Doti AI integrates data from services like Confluence, Datadog, Gitlab, Jira, Monday, Notion, Slack, Salesforce, Zendesk and others, and then makes this data available on demand, through a chat experience in Slack, for example, as well as through what Doti calls its ‘AutoPilot.’ The AutoPilot proactively monitors Slack channels and when it comes across a question it can answer, it will respond directly in that channel.
This, Doti co-founders Matan Cohen (CEO) and Opher Hofshi (CPO) told me, is also how Doti quickly reaches critical mass within a company, as employees go from seeing Doti in their various Slack channels and then start 1:1 chats with the service as well.
Image Credits:Doti AI
The two co-founders first met at Wix, when Cohen worked on the service’s infrastructure and Hofshi led a team of security architects. “When we left Wix [in 2023], we didn’t really know what we’re going to do,” Hofshi told me. “Our initial thought was going into one of our areas — doing what we’ve been doing for the last couple of years. For me, it was cyber security, and for Matan, it was about the infrastructure.”
During the ideation process, they realized that enterprise search remains an unsolved problem. “The problem Doti solves is something that we felt at Wix,” Cohen said. And solving it, the founders argue, takes expertise in building the integrations, but also a strong focus on security.
“What we believe is that every person, every group, every process, every company will need to have some sort of AI in their veins — or their processes — and it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when, and how fast companies will adapt,” Cohen said.
The team argues that even though other companies may offer similar features at first glance, its approach offers quite a bit more flexibility. That’s because Doti was built from the ground up to, for example, allow businesses to bring their own large language models to the service, all while also helping them set their own security policies. “We know how to bring a very good solution for enterprises and we’re as flexible as they want,” Cohen said. “You want to bring your own LLM? go for it. You want to bring your own cloud? We can do this. You want to do AWS, you want to do Azure, you want to do GCP? Go for it, and this is on the infra level, and this is a deal breaker for organizations.”
The company’s $7 million seed round was led by F2 Venture Capital, with participation from a number of angel investors, including Jared Kasner, a general partner at Ineffable Ventures, and Guy Flechter, the CEO of Sola Security.
Before he joined TechCrunch in 2012, he founded SiliconFilter and wrote for ReadWriteWeb (now ReadWrite). Frederic covers enterprise, cloud, developer tools, Google, Microsoft, gadgets, transportation and anything else he finds interesting. He owns just over a 50th of a bitcoin.
