Let’s start with the premise that many people take notes as they work with customers as part of their jobs. As they take notes, they may need to access a customer record in Salesforce or open a Jira ticket to get IT involved with a customer problem, but to do that, they must undertake the dreaded task switching, where you switch out of the application you’re working in and open another application to complete a different job or access additional information.
Noded AI, a new startup, wants to change that by making all your work tools available from where you take notes in an automated fashion, eliminating the need to task switch. Today, the company emerged from stealth with a $4 million investment.
“We are reinventing the note taking space and using AI and a bit of automation data science to basically put notes at the center of the enterprise,” Noded CTO and co-founder Steve Wood told TechCrunch.
The Noded name, aside from a clever play on words, comes from the fact that the company sees notes not as a large document, but as bits of information that fit together in a knowledge graph. “The note becomes a graph where each fragment of information is a node on the graph, so if I were say, in a meeting with you, I can see all the tasks and context around you, and it would just filter through all of my notes across weeks, months, whatever,” he said.
And you can access all the information you need from within Noded without having to switch programs because it’s all designed to bring the apps you need to you automatically within the context of your work.”So rather than having your notes in one place, and all your applications in another, it’s making your notes part of the flow of work where, as you type your notes, Noded will help you get it into the right system. So you don’t have to double enter all the time,” he said.
Wood was previously VP of product and platform at Slack, another company that has tried to be the center of work, but using communications instead of notes as the centering mechanism. Wood says that one of the things he realized helping build the Slack platform, was it required more context, and he feels like the notes metaphor provides that.
“Part of the realization from Slack was that without having the context around the customer or the other business objects, all we could do was just push alerts to you, which kind of just made your life more confusing because it’s hard to track,” he said. “Why do I care about that Zendesk ticket? Oh, yeah, it’s because Acme was asking about it. So we can give you that context, it makes it easier for you to do your work, but it also makes things a lot less noisy.”
AI plays a role in the way work is pulled from the notes and linked to an application, but for their purposes, Wood says it doesn’t have to be super sophisticated. “Today’s LLMs are perfectly fine for our purposes,” he said. “It’s kind of like having an administrator who’s sitting there doing the really tedious work that you don’t want to do,” he said.
His co-founder and CEO, Chris Port, came from Dell Boomi. The two co-founders actually worked together at Boomi, prior to Wood joining Slack in 2020.
It’s early days. The company launched in September and began building in earnest after the first of the year. “And this will be our ‘Hello World’ moment where we announced the company,” Port said. The startup is working with some early customers and working towards a formal beta some time this year.
Today’s $4 million investment was led by Boldstart Ventures with participation from Bessemer Venture Partners, 20VC and First Hand Ventures. Wood’s old bosses at Slack, co-founders Stewart Butterfield and Cal Henderson also participated, as well as Okta co-founder Frederic Kerrest.