Generative AI startup WorkHack Secures $1.5M in Seed Round

Generative AI startup WorkHack has raised $1.5 million in seed funding round. The fund will be utilized to develop the company’s AI tech layer which allows businesses to deploy safe, thoughtful, and responsible AI functions. 

The funding round was co-led by Together Fund along with Nexus Venture Partners, with additional participation from The New Normal Fund led by Allison Pickens along with marquee angel investors.

The founder of WorkHack, Akshat Tyagi, was an early stage user of Open AIs original GPT3 model in 2021 and has seen first-hand the development of various large language models (LLMs) since. Despite the widespread interest and adoption of the technology its direct commercial use cases are yet to go beyond copywriting and search chatbots. Moreover, LLMs remain a black box of unknowns for companies to deploy for serious business applications. 

WorkHack has been building tools that allow companies to deploy safe, thoughtful and responsible AI without having to build AI models of their own. Gartner suggests that Responsible AI can enable the right outcomes by resolving dilemmas rooted in delivering value versus tolerating risks. Responsible AI is an umbrella term for aspects of making appropriate business and ethical choices when adopting AI, including business and societal value, risk, trust, transparency, fairness, bias mitigation, explainability, accountability, safety, privacy and regulatory compliance. Responsible AI will take 5 to 10 years to reach mainstream adoption but will ultimately have a transformational impact on business.  

Established in 2021, WorkHack began working with business in the recruitment industry building AI for interviews using GPT3. After successfully onboarding multiple large enterprise customers within a few months of going live, and realizing the opportunity was much larger than they initially anticipated, the company branched into the marketing-tech sector with use-cases for conversions, consultation journeys, cancellations, habit formation and lead qualification. 

Today, WorkHack is the infrastructure that provides templates of use cases for companies to build custom conversational agents and deploy them on their own delivery stacks like web, mobile and Whatsapp. WorkHack AI has already made over a million conversations towards specific goals. Gartner has reported that by 2025, 30% of outbound marketing messages from large organizations will be synthetically generated, up from less than 2% in 2022. 

Akshat Tyagi, founder of WorkHack said: “ChatGPT is an exciting consumer tool to play with and there is palpable excitement among companies also, even large customer engagement platforms like Intercom, Hubspot and Salesforce have attempted to use generative AI within their current products. WorkHack answers the questions of how to make the adoption scale responsibily. We will be the stable AI layer that enterprises trust for solving their generative AI journey. Our core strength is recognising what areas of human interactions can significantly benefit from a technology that appears to be able to think and reason”.  

He added, “Many companies are trying and have tried to train their own LLMs for security reasons, but more often than not these do not stand a chance against models built by larger tech companies. WorkHack will be the layer on the top of existing LLMs to make it viable for businesses to move forward with AI adoption”.

Manav Garg, Founding Partner, Together Fund and CEO, Eka said, “We are thrilled to partner with Workhack, a leading provider of generative AI solutions. As every business will need tools to control and leverage Generative AI to drive better customer engagement, we believe that Workhack is the ideal partner for the businesses to achieve that goal. Workhack’s platform makes it seamless for any consumer-facing enterprise to make AI goals driven towards their sales & marketing use cases, in a predictable and secure fashion”.

Jishnu Bhattacharjee, managing director, Nexus Venture Partners, said ,“Application layer for generative AI till now has primarily aided activities like copywriting and graphic editing. WorkHack aims to build predictability and goal alignment for companies to deploy and find their own interesting use-cases of Gen AI. We are thrilled to partner with Akshat and WorkHack team to help drive the adoption of Generative AI at scale”.