Image courtesy of Bardeen

According to TechCrunch, Bardeen's platform uses a natural language interface to automate repetitive knowledge work. The company raised $3 million in the new funding round, bringing its total funding to $22 million. If it weren't for the fact that the investors who participated in this round of funding would have provided a significant distribution channel for the platform, this might have been a vague concept. Dropbox and HubSpot have developed a number of companies through their venture capital divisions (Dropbox Ventures and HubSpot VenturesBecome strategic investors in the startup, and the two companies will also help distribute the technology that Bardeen released this Thursday.

Every day, employees around the world spend countless hours performing tedious, repetitive tasks, such as converting documents into PDFs, uploading them to hard drives, sucking them into databases, and emailing them to their teams. While UiPath was a pioneer in this "bot" process, it has also shifted to an AI-driven operating model, and even a number of startups (Signavio, Servicetrace, etc.) have jumped in to follow. Now, a startup called Bardeen has launched a service that automates this kind of work for businesses after receiving a new round of funding.

If you think it's "Zapier with more AI", you're close to what Bardeen has to offer, but it's a bit more complex than you think. It's largely a platform for the average person within the enterprise to perform repetitive tasks, rather than a product built for the IT department. Bardeen's interface to TechCrunch shows how easy it is to automate complex workflows.

The platform seems to be able to do a lot of things: it can copy-paste text from one document to another, search the web for relevant information, and then put all the information into an email and send it. The startup says it has more than 300,000 users and more than 1,000 paying customers, including Deel, Miro, Kearney, WPP and 10Web.

Founded in 2020 by Artem Harutyunyan and Pascal Weinberger, Bardeen's Agent platform is a browser extension that is context-aware, so agents can perform "planning" steps upon receiving user instructions – which helps improve repeatability, according to Bardeen. The company also says that its assistant is constantly learning from usage patterns.

It also integrates with 100 tools like Microsoft 365, most CRMs, and sales platforms.

Reproducibility is very important because it's not easy to get an AI platform to give the same answer twice. In a business environment, without this predictability, any product will collapse.

CEO Pascal Weinberger told TechCrunch, "The problem with other AI solutions is that they can't be repeatable. If you give it the same task, it will do two different things. Essentially, that's how these language models work, but they're hard to use for real business applications. "

So, what is Bardeen's approach?

"You can type in your prompts, like take minutes of a meeting, convert it into a PDF, extract email addresses, and send the PDF to everyone," Weinberg said. "

"The platform runs through a language model, and that's where differentiation begins. It has a planning phase. As a result, the model calculates that it has to go into the calendar and extract calendar events, extract email addresses, create PDFs, and so on. He adds: "It can do that, and then I can type 'send a PDF to Pascal on Slack at the same time'." "

Once the model comes up with a plan, it sticks to it: "So the next time I ask it to do the same thing, [the process] has become a learning skill, just like you teach an assistant or junior." So I can just write in natural language and get the whole thing done. Everyone can build such automation.

Of course, as usual, the question is, what LLMs does the platform utilize?

Weinberg said they used Gemini to translate the questions and the OpenAI GPT model for "specific automated exercises." "But every week a new model comes out, and we have a benchmark to see which model is better at which task," he added. "

While Zapier, UIPath, and others are all racing to play catch-up, it looks like Bardeen is ready to jump to the top, at least for now. 

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