Seattle startup Cimba.ai emerged from stealth mode and announced a $1.25 million pre-seed investment to accelerate development of its software that lets companies develop customizable AI agents to generate insights and actions based on internal data.
Founded last year by former Airbnb and Amazon engineers, the 9-person company has a handful of paying customers that use Cimba to optimize ad campaigns, automate data-related processes, and produce recommendations for increasing revenue, among other tasks.
The idea is to combine the latest large language model technology with organization-specific content from tools such as Snowflake, while offering a way to train and finetune those models.
“For example, a customer success manager may want to know which customers need a majority of their attention this week,” said Cimba CEO Subu Biswas. “They can ask Cimba.ai by using natural language and receive an answer backed by company information.”
Other potential questions Cimba can answer: Who are 20 customers we should focus on this week? Are there any deals that require my attention? Can you analyze and improve my lowest-performing sales?
Cimba’s name comes from the acronym: “Contextualized Insights Make Business Action.”
“After talking to many other data and business leaders, I realized that most companies want to improve their data utilization in business operations,” Biswas wrote on LinkedIn. “Data warehouse costs are growing, but the relative ROI is diminishing as most analytical products are almost stuck at the same stage as 15 years ago. We have seen 100s of BI tools with nicer and faster visualization, but it’s disconnected from day-to-day business processes.”
There are a flurry of up-and-coming firms offering similar custom AI tools for companies, including Seattle startups Vieu, which provides buyer intelligence and execution strategies, and Rhythms, which analyzes a company’s “rhythms,” or habits and patterns.
Biswas was most recently an engineering manager at Airbnb, where he helped lead a team that built internal apps to improve internal processes. He also previously worked at Microsoft. Biswas co-founded Cimba with Vishal Das, a former applied scientist at Amazon Web Services and earned a Ph.D from Stanford.
Ripple Ventures, a B2B software-focused firm based in Toronto, led the pre-seed round. Other backers include Seattle-area investors SeaChange and Pack VC, as well as angel investors such as Gable.ai CEO Chad Sanderson and former LinkedIn engineer Chris Riccomini.
