Datch, a startup that creates voice assistants with AI for business clients, revealed today that it has secured $10 million in a Series A round headed by Blackhorn Ventures. According to CEO Mark Fosdike, the money will be used on business expansion as well as the creation of additional software support, tools, and capabilities.
Datch began when Fosdike, who has a background in aerospace engineering, met Aric Thorn and Ben Purcell, two former Siemens engineers. They all realized that speech systems designed for business users must overcome difficulties peculiar to the industry, such as those posed by comprehending the jargon, acronyms, and syntax used by certain clients.
“The way we extract information from systems changes every year, but the way we input information — especially in the industrial world — hasn’t changed since the invention of the keyboard and database,” Fosdike said. “The industrial world had been left in the dark for years, and we knew that developing a technology with voice-visual AI would help light the way for these factories.”
The voice assistants that Datch creates employ AI to parse orders like “Report a problem for the Line 1 Spot Welder” to gather and organize data from users in a plant or out in the field. I predict that fixing it will take an hour. They are smartphone applications that connect to current systems to write and read data, including data from platforms for business resources and asset management.
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