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Today, I’m excited to announce that Pryon closed a $100 million Series B investment round led by Thomas Tull’s US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT). I wanted to share more about this milestone and how it supports our task and purpose. Luckily, I get to do this in writing versus a long-winded speech at the Oscars!
Firstly, I want to thank the USIT team for their vote of confidence and for the Breyer Capital team who introduced us. Breyer and Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund co-led our Series A in 2019 together with Digital Alpha Advisors and Greycroft. Beyond them, we wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for the years of support conferred to us since inception by BootstrapLabs, Carolina Angel Network, Engage Ventures, Gaingels, Good Growth Capital, Micron Ventures, Piedmont Capital Partners, Rex Health Ventures, Steel Perlot, Two Sigma Ventures, and a myriad of others. It certainly wasn’t a sure thing when they joined our cap table, yet they were able to see what we saw with conviction that entire industries would be disrupted by artificial intelligence (AI).
USIT’s dual-use mission backs ventures like Pryon that serve both commercial and public sectors. They recognize our technology as an essential element of a global-spanning digital supply chain that supports critical infrastructure, something that the pandemic laid bare. It’s become clear that what we’ve been working towards will become a mandatory part of the enterprise software stack well before the end of this decade. At the risk of sounding too folksy, it’s truly a blessing to be working with all involved since we align on multiple levels. Our backers called this market early and cannot be described as fair-weather friends, since they first invested prior to generative AI (GAI) hitting the mainstream.
In 2007, at the inaugural TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, an event lampooned on HBO’s comedy Silicon Valley, I pulled a flip phone out of my jacket pocket and spoke into it, my words being transcribed by the world’s first ever cloud-based speech recognition (ASR) engine. A second later, a response was uttered out loud via the world’s first cloud-based text to speech (TTS) engine. And… crickets. Nobody knew what the heck I was showing them. What I was not allowed to reveal at the time is that we were secretly working with Apple on a prototype of Siri, years before an iPhone that could support that capability even existed. Five years later, my previous venture, Yap, was acquired by Amazon as their first ever AI-related M&A. There, it would form the nucleus of Alexa and the race was on to permeate AI into our personal lives. We were ahead of our time, as our engine had an implementation of neural networks before the famed research papers that came out in succeeding years.
I then started thinking about how AI would eventually come to our workplaces. Yet, by 2017, I remained surprised by how underdeveloped it still was in intensive enterprise environments, especially given more recent and significant discoveries in transformers-based architectures. It was clear from our backgrounds that the experience of asking a question and getting an instantaneous answer was groundbreaking in the consumer world. However, this capability was missing in academic, corporate, government, and nonprofit environments. So, I recruited key practitioners in our field and adjacent fields out of Big Tech and rounded up the team to catch our own football, since many of us were behind these incarnations you already used at home.
We established Pryon to solve a persistent but surmountable problem impacting enterprises across every industry. We call it knowledge friction: the disconnect between buried, high-value content and the people who need to get accurate information quickly to deliver precise work. This challenge was exacerbated by the cloud and mobile revolutions, which enabled an explosion of content that, paradoxically, made information harder for people to find and use. Our team saw an opportunity to create an AI-powered knowledge management solution capable of ingesting then traversing the vast quantity of content available and distilling it down to the sugar packets of information individuals need to make informed decisions.
We established Pryon to solve a problem impacting enterprises across every industry: knowledge friction — the disconnect between buried, high-value content and the people who need to get accurate information quickly.
We created a first-of-its-kind knowledge fabric that weaves together the majority of an organization’s content to extract valuable intelligence and know-how. Pryon unlocks previously impossible-to-find known and tribal knowledge, enabling users to glean precious pearls of wisdom from their unstructured multimodal data. In doing so, we deliver our clients a decision advantage through authoritative, reliable, and verifiable answers.
I’m immensely proud that Pryon is deployed today by Fortune 500 companies and government agencies to reimagine the future of work. You can say that we’re trusted by brands that know better. Unlike consumer-first generative tools, Pryon’s SOC 2-compliant platform was purpose-built for the enterprise. Our novel approach to model building includes computer vision (CV), large language models (LLMs), and proprietary connectors that ensure our platform remains grounded on our four pillars of enterprise AI: accuracy, scalability, security, and speed.
But we don’t stop there. Responsible AI (RAI) is not just an afterthought or a buzzword to us. It’s a commitment that we take very seriously and embedded in our DNA. Because it’s an extrapolation of our last venture, where many of our design decisions were made to ensure personal information like contacts, phone calls, and texts were never revealed — almost a decade before anyone ever talked about ethical AIs.
In the Pryon platform, RAI is represented through four key initiatives:
You can learn more about Pryon’s commitments to RAI in our upcoming webinar series.
As a pioneer in developing enterprise-grade AI solutions, Pryon remains at the tip of the spear because our team is used to operating there. We are inventing technologies that others will name years later as it’s always been. We’re using the resources from our Series B round to support two key developments for Pryon’s continued leadership of AI-enhanced knowledge management: growth and innovation.
We’ll cover more about these exciting initiatives in Part Two of this letter. Or, you can register for our Just Know Now webinar series to be the first to hear about it.
I remember reading Isaac Asimov’s iconic science fiction masterpiece Foundation as a teenager. It inspired me to dream of a world where math could predict the future to prevent catastrophes. We’re on the cusp of having technologies that will allow us to better the world in all our respective disciplines by increasing the magnitude of consumable knowledge. It is in this spirit that we established this venture and now project Pryon into the future.
I want to give special thanks to David Nahamoo, our Chief Scientist, and Chris Mahl, our President and COO. I met David during my days at IBM and still find it surreal that I get to work with an intellect of his caliber. We don’t get to this stage without the top-flight R&D talent that he was able to recruit. Chris represents the other side of the equation as a luminary in commercialization. Given his previous leadership experiences at brands such as Informatica, Oracle, and Salesforce, we’re able to develop a full-spectrum team that deploys AI in a way that’s relevant to organizations, by priority staging outcomes that matter to them.
Thank you to our clients, investors, and partners for their continued and growing confidence in us. Not a day goes by when we’re not thinking about your future needs and wants since we recognize your importance to safeguarding and supporting our communities.
Finally, I’m incredibly grateful to our team of hard-working Pryoneers for all their tireless efforts in reaching this milestone, and I am inspired about where we’re going next. We look forward to sharing more with you in the coming days, weeks, and months.
To learn more about our Series B funding round, read the press release.
Discover how you can eliminate knowledge friction with Pryon. Register for the webinar today.
Today, I’m excited to announce that Pryon closed a $100 million Series B investment round led by Thomas Tull’s US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT). I wanted to share more about this milestone and how it supports our task and purpose. Luckily, I get to do this in writing versus a long-winded speech at the Oscars!
Firstly, I want to thank the USIT team for their vote of confidence and for the Breyer Capital team who introduced us. Breyer and Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund co-led our Series A in 2019 together with Digital Alpha Advisors and Greycroft. Beyond them, we wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for the years of support conferred to us since inception by BootstrapLabs, Carolina Angel Network, Engage Ventures, Gaingels, Good Growth Capital, Micron Ventures, Piedmont Capital Partners, Rex Health Ventures, Steel Perlot, Two Sigma Ventures, and a myriad of others. It certainly wasn’t a sure thing when they joined our cap table, yet they were able to see what we saw with conviction that entire industries would be disrupted by artificial intelligence (AI).
USIT’s dual-use mission backs ventures like Pryon that serve both commercial and public sectors. They recognize our technology as an essential element of a global-spanning digital supply chain that supports critical infrastructure, something that the pandemic laid bare. It’s become clear that what we’ve been working towards will become a mandatory part of the enterprise software stack well before the end of this decade. At the risk of sounding too folksy, it’s truly a blessing to be working with all involved since we align on multiple levels. Our backers called this market early and cannot be described as fair-weather friends, since they first invested prior to generative AI (GAI) hitting the mainstream.
In 2007, at the inaugural TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, an event lampooned on HBO’s comedy Silicon Valley, I pulled a flip phone out of my jacket pocket and spoke into it, my words being transcribed by the world’s first ever cloud-based speech recognition (ASR) engine. A second later, a response was uttered out loud via the world’s first cloud-based text to speech (TTS) engine. And… crickets. Nobody knew what the heck I was showing them. What I was not allowed to reveal at the time is that we were secretly working with Apple on a prototype of Siri, years before an iPhone that could support that capability even existed. Five years later, my previous venture, Yap, was acquired by Amazon as their first ever AI-related M&A. There, it would form the nucleus of Alexa and the race was on to permeate AI into our personal lives. We were ahead of our time, as our engine had an implementation of neural networks before the famed research papers that came out in succeeding years.
I then started thinking about how AI would eventually come to our workplaces. Yet, by 2017, I remained surprised by how underdeveloped it still was in intensive enterprise environments, especially given more recent and significant discoveries in transformers-based architectures. It was clear from our backgrounds that the experience of asking a question and getting an instantaneous answer was groundbreaking in the consumer world. However, this capability was missing in academic, corporate, government, and nonprofit environments. So, I recruited key practitioners in our field and adjacent fields out of Big Tech and rounded up the team to catch our own football, since many of us were behind these incarnations you already used at home.
We established Pryon to solve a persistent but surmountable problem impacting enterprises across every industry. We call it knowledge friction: the disconnect between buried, high-value content and the people who need to get accurate information quickly to deliver precise work. This challenge was exacerbated by the cloud and mobile revolutions, which enabled an explosion of content that, paradoxically, made information harder for people to find and use. Our team saw an opportunity to create an AI-powered knowledge management solution capable of ingesting then traversing the vast quantity of content available and distilling it down to the sugar packets of information individuals need to make informed decisions.
We established Pryon to solve a problem impacting enterprises across every industry: knowledge friction — the disconnect between buried, high-value content and the people who need to get accurate information quickly.
We created a first-of-its-kind knowledge fabric that weaves together the majority of an organization’s content to extract valuable intelligence and know-how. Pryon unlocks previously impossible-to-find known and tribal knowledge, enabling users to glean precious pearls of wisdom from their unstructured multimodal data. In doing so, we deliver our clients a decision advantage through authoritative, reliable, and verifiable answers.
I’m immensely proud that Pryon is deployed today by Fortune 500 companies and government agencies to reimagine the future of work. You can say that we’re trusted by brands that know better. Unlike consumer-first generative tools, Pryon’s SOC 2-compliant platform was purpose-built for the enterprise. Our novel approach to model building includes computer vision (CV), large language models (LLMs), and proprietary connectors that ensure our platform remains grounded on our four pillars of enterprise AI: accuracy, scalability, security, and speed.
But we don’t stop there. Responsible AI (RAI) is not just an afterthought or a buzzword to us. It’s a commitment that we take very seriously and embedded in our DNA. Because it’s an extrapolation of our last venture, where many of our design decisions were made to ensure personal information like contacts, phone calls, and texts were never revealed — almost a decade before anyone ever talked about ethical AIs.
In the Pryon platform, RAI is represented through four key initiatives:
You can learn more about Pryon’s commitments to RAI in our upcoming webinar series.
As a pioneer in developing enterprise-grade AI solutions, Pryon remains at the tip of the spear because our team is used to operating there. We are inventing technologies that others will name years later as it’s always been. We’re using the resources from our Series B round to support two key developments for Pryon’s continued leadership of AI-enhanced knowledge management: growth and innovation.
We’ll cover more about these exciting initiatives in Part Two of this letter. Or, you can register for our Just Know Now webinar series to be the first to hear about it.
I remember reading Isaac Asimov’s iconic science fiction masterpiece Foundation as a teenager. It inspired me to dream of a world where math could predict the future to prevent catastrophes. We’re on the cusp of having technologies that will allow us to better the world in all our respective disciplines by increasing the magnitude of consumable knowledge. It is in this spirit that we established this venture and now project Pryon into the future.
I want to give special thanks to David Nahamoo, our Chief Scientist, and Chris Mahl, our President and COO. I met David during my days at IBM and still find it surreal that I get to work with an intellect of his caliber. We don’t get to this stage without the top-flight R&D talent that he was able to recruit. Chris represents the other side of the equation as a luminary in commercialization. Given his previous leadership experiences at brands such as Informatica, Oracle, and Salesforce, we’re able to develop a full-spectrum team that deploys AI in a way that’s relevant to organizations, by priority staging outcomes that matter to them.
Thank you to our clients, investors, and partners for their continued and growing confidence in us. Not a day goes by when we’re not thinking about your future needs and wants since we recognize your importance to safeguarding and supporting our communities.
Finally, I’m incredibly grateful to our team of hard-working Pryoneers for all their tireless efforts in reaching this milestone, and I am inspired about where we’re going next. We look forward to sharing more with you in the coming days, weeks, and months.
To learn more about our Series B funding round, read the press release.
Discover how you can eliminate knowledge friction with Pryon. Register for the webinar today.
Today, I’m excited to announce that Pryon closed a $100 million Series B investment round led by Thomas Tull’s US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT). I wanted to share more about this milestone and how it supports our task and purpose. Luckily, I get to do this in writing versus a long-winded speech at the Oscars!
Firstly, I want to thank the USIT team for their vote of confidence and for the Breyer Capital team who introduced us. Breyer and Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund co-led our Series A in 2019 together with Digital Alpha Advisors and Greycroft. Beyond them, we wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for the years of support conferred to us since inception by BootstrapLabs, Carolina Angel Network, Engage Ventures, Gaingels, Good Growth Capital, Micron Ventures, Piedmont Capital Partners, Rex Health Ventures, Steel Perlot, Two Sigma Ventures, and a myriad of others. It certainly wasn’t a sure thing when they joined our cap table, yet they were able to see what we saw with conviction that entire industries would be disrupted by artificial intelligence (AI).
USIT’s dual-use mission backs ventures like Pryon that serve both commercial and public sectors. They recognize our technology as an essential element of a global-spanning digital supply chain that supports critical infrastructure, something that the pandemic laid bare. It’s become clear that what we’ve been working towards will become a mandatory part of the enterprise software stack well before the end of this decade. At the risk of sounding too folksy, it’s truly a blessing to be working with all involved since we align on multiple levels. Our backers called this market early and cannot be described as fair-weather friends, since they first invested prior to generative AI (GAI) hitting the mainstream.
In 2007, at the inaugural TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, an event lampooned on HBO’s comedy Silicon Valley, I pulled a flip phone out of my jacket pocket and spoke into it, my words being transcribed by the world’s first ever cloud-based speech recognition (ASR) engine. A second later, a response was uttered out loud via the world’s first cloud-based text to speech (TTS) engine. And… crickets. Nobody knew what the heck I was showing them. What I was not allowed to reveal at the time is that we were secretly working with Apple on a prototype of Siri, years before an iPhone that could support that capability even existed. Five years later, my previous venture, Yap, was acquired by Amazon as their first ever AI-related M&A. There, it would form the nucleus of Alexa and the race was on to permeate AI into our personal lives. We were ahead of our time, as our engine had an implementation of neural networks before the famed research papers that came out in succeeding years.
I then started thinking about how AI would eventually come to our workplaces. Yet, by 2017, I remained surprised by how underdeveloped it still was in intensive enterprise environments, especially given more recent and significant discoveries in transformers-based architectures. It was clear from our backgrounds that the experience of asking a question and getting an instantaneous answer was groundbreaking in the consumer world. However, this capability was missing in academic, corporate, government, and nonprofit environments. So, I recruited key practitioners in our field and adjacent fields out of Big Tech and rounded up the team to catch our own football, since many of us were behind these incarnations you already used at home.
We established Pryon to solve a persistent but surmountable problem impacting enterprises across every industry. We call it knowledge friction: the disconnect between buried, high-value content and the people who need to get accurate information quickly to deliver precise work. This challenge was exacerbated by the cloud and mobile revolutions, which enabled an explosion of content that, paradoxically, made information harder for people to find and use. Our team saw an opportunity to create an AI-powered knowledge management solution capable of ingesting then traversing the vast quantity of content available and distilling it down to the sugar packets of information individuals need to make informed decisions.
We established Pryon to solve a problem impacting enterprises across every industry: knowledge friction — the disconnect between buried, high-value content and the people who need to get accurate information quickly.
We created a first-of-its-kind knowledge fabric that weaves together the majority of an organization’s content to extract valuable intelligence and know-how. Pryon unlocks previously impossible-to-find known and tribal knowledge, enabling users to glean precious pearls of wisdom from their unstructured multimodal data. In doing so, we deliver our clients a decision advantage through authoritative, reliable, and verifiable answers.
I’m immensely proud that Pryon is deployed today by Fortune 500 companies and government agencies to reimagine the future of work. You can say that we’re trusted by brands that know better. Unlike consumer-first generative tools, Pryon’s SOC 2-compliant platform was purpose-built for the enterprise. Our novel approach to model building includes computer vision (CV), large language models (LLMs), and proprietary connectors that ensure our platform remains grounded on our four pillars of enterprise AI: accuracy, scalability, security, and speed.
But we don’t stop there. Responsible AI (RAI) is not just an afterthought or a buzzword to us. It’s a commitment that we take very seriously and embedded in our DNA. Because it’s an extrapolation of our last venture, where many of our design decisions were made to ensure personal information like contacts, phone calls, and texts were never revealed — almost a decade before anyone ever talked about ethical AIs.
In the Pryon platform, RAI is represented through four key initiatives:
You can learn more about Pryon’s commitments to RAI in our upcoming webinar series.
As a pioneer in developing enterprise-grade AI solutions, Pryon remains at the tip of the spear because our team is used to operating there. We are inventing technologies that others will name years later as it’s always been. We’re using the resources from our Series B round to support two key developments for Pryon’s continued leadership of AI-enhanced knowledge management: growth and innovation.
We’ll cover more about these exciting initiatives in Part Two of this letter. Or, you can register for our Just Know Now webinar series to be the first to hear about it.
I remember reading Isaac Asimov’s iconic science fiction masterpiece Foundation as a teenager. It inspired me to dream of a world where math could predict the future to prevent catastrophes. We’re on the cusp of having technologies that will allow us to better the world in all our respective disciplines by increasing the magnitude of consumable knowledge. It is in this spirit that we established this venture and now project Pryon into the future.
I want to give special thanks to David Nahamoo, our Chief Scientist, and Chris Mahl, our President and COO. I met David during my days at IBM and still find it surreal that I get to work with an intellect of his caliber. We don’t get to this stage without the top-flight R&D talent that he was able to recruit. Chris represents the other side of the equation as a luminary in commercialization. Given his previous leadership experiences at brands such as Informatica, Oracle, and Salesforce, we’re able to develop a full-spectrum team that deploys AI in a way that’s relevant to organizations, by priority staging outcomes that matter to them.
Thank you to our clients, investors, and partners for their continued and growing confidence in us. Not a day goes by when we’re not thinking about your future needs and wants since we recognize your importance to safeguarding and supporting our communities.
Finally, I’m incredibly grateful to our team of hard-working Pryoneers for all their tireless efforts in reaching this milestone, and I am inspired about where we’re going next. We look forward to sharing more with you in the coming days, weeks, and months.
To learn more about our Series B funding round, read the press release.
Discover how you can eliminate knowledge friction with Pryon. Register for the webinar today.
Why knowledge friction costs enterprises thousands of hours of productivity. Four common approaches to solving the enterprise productivity problem — and why they fall shortHow to unlock the value of AI and solve your productivity problem with a Knowledge AI platform
70% of employees report spending an hour or more searching for a single piece of information.*
Companies are creating more content and data than ever – but most of it isn’t discoverable. This frustrating disconnect between content creators and content consumers is what we call knowledge friction. And it costs enterprises thousands of hours of productivity.
*2024 Survey on Information Discovery, Unisphere Research.
Companies have tried various solutions to generate actionable answers from their existing content, yet the enterprise productivity problem remains. Where web search, legacy enterprise search, homegrown solutions, and AI startups all fall short, Knowledge AI is eliminating knowledge friction once and for all.
Using cutting-edge technology like natural language processing (NLP) and retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), an enterprise Knowledge AI platform swiftly extracts valuable knowledge from existing content, reading it like a human would, and transforming that knowledge into answers for your teams.
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Stop endlessly searching through PubMed to find the right citation, research guidance, or trial data. RAE lets you ask a question, queries millions of information sources, and delivers the right answer in less than a second, pointing you to the source document(s) in case you’d like to gather more context.
Your own research data may contain insights that are even more valuable than the information hidden in MEDLINE and other biomedical literature. That’s why RAE allows researchers to upload their own research, such as clinical trial findings, patient data, and internal unpublished research papers.
RAE delivers trustworthy, verifiable, always up-to-date answers, which are critical in a research setting. RAE’s best-in-class retrieval model uses advanced machine learning, computer vision, and optical character recognition to read complex information — even handwritten documents and diagrams — like a human would. RAE never hallucinates, since it only pulls from trusted research content, and delivers over 90% accuracy out of the box (with further improvements over time).
For many organizations, life sciences research can comprise tens of thousands of voluminous research articles. RAE’s massive storage and compute resources enable it to ingest terabytes of research data — including PDFs, text files, images, video, and more — and transform that data into accurate answers.
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To ensure private research data and queries remain private, RAE runs entirely on-premises, not in a public cloud environment. RAE comes preloaded with Pryon, a Knowledge AI platform. Pryon’s AI models do not train on your data, so your data remains yours and yours alone. The system additionally ensures security against external parties with a self-contained, SOC 2 Type II-compliant architecture. All running securely on-prem on Dell PowerEdge servers.
“We can’t wait to see how pharmaceutical companies, research institutes, and development organizations use the Pryon | Dell Research Answer Engine. With this solution, life science experts can spend less time searching PubMed and internal resources for answers and more time conducting game-changing research.”
— Alex Long, Head of Strategy, Life Sciences at Dell Technologies
RAE helps accelerate the research process by enabling researchers to quickly get answers to their questions directly from trusted sources, such as MEDLINE and private research. Life science researchers no longer need to waste time and energy hunting for valuable information when they could instead be helping develop new treatments.
- Where stalled information access is holding enterprises back
- The leading barriers to delivering business-critical information to end users
- The top AI use cases enterprise leaders are exploring for 2024
- Strategies for implementing AI solutions without exposing your organization to risk
92% of enterprise leaders agree that access to fast, accurate information from unstructured content is vital to their business.
70% of leaders report that employees in their organization spend more than an hour looking for a piece of information, with nearly a quarter (23%) spending more than 5 hours.
The two leading use cases for AI involve helping users better understand and get answers from information spread across the enterprise.
Today, I’m excited to announce that Pryon closed a $100 million Series B investment round led by Thomas Tull’s US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT). I wanted to share more about this milestone and how it supports our task and purpose. Luckily, I get to do this in writing versus a long-winded speech at the Oscars!
Firstly, I want to thank the USIT team for their vote of confidence and for the Breyer Capital team who introduced us. Breyer and Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund co-led our Series A in 2019 together with Digital Alpha Advisors and Greycroft. Beyond them, we wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for the years of support conferred to us since inception by BootstrapLabs, Carolina Angel Network, Engage Ventures, Gaingels, Good Growth Capital, Micron Ventures, Piedmont Capital Partners, Rex Health Ventures, Steel Perlot, Two Sigma Ventures, and a myriad of others. It certainly wasn’t a sure thing when they joined our cap table, yet they were able to see what we saw with conviction that entire industries would be disrupted by artificial intelligence (AI).
USIT’s dual-use mission backs ventures like Pryon that serve both commercial and public sectors. They recognize our technology as an essential element of a global-spanning digital supply chain that supports critical infrastructure, something that the pandemic laid bare. It’s become clear that what we’ve been working towards will become a mandatory part of the enterprise software stack well before the end of this decade. At the risk of sounding too folksy, it’s truly a blessing to be working with all involved since we align on multiple levels. Our backers called this market early and cannot be described as fair-weather friends, since they first invested prior to generative AI (GAI) hitting the mainstream.
In 2007, at the inaugural TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, an event lampooned on HBO’s comedy Silicon Valley, I pulled a flip phone out of my jacket pocket and spoke into it, my words being transcribed by the world’s first ever cloud-based speech recognition (ASR) engine. A second later, a response was uttered out loud via the world’s first cloud-based text to speech (TTS) engine. And… crickets. Nobody knew what the heck I was showing them. What I was not allowed to reveal at the time is that we were secretly working with Apple on a prototype of Siri, years before an iPhone that could support that capability even existed. Five years later, my previous venture, Yap, was acquired by Amazon as their first ever AI-related M&A. There, it would form the nucleus of Alexa and the race was on to permeate AI into our personal lives. We were ahead of our time, as our engine had an implementation of neural networks before the famed research papers that came out in succeeding years.
I then started thinking about how AI would eventually come to our workplaces. Yet, by 2017, I remained surprised by how underdeveloped it still was in intensive enterprise environments, especially given more recent and significant discoveries in transformers-based architectures. It was clear from our backgrounds that the experience of asking a question and getting an instantaneous answer was groundbreaking in the consumer world. However, this capability was missing in academic, corporate, government, and nonprofit environments. So, I recruited key practitioners in our field and adjacent fields out of Big Tech and rounded up the team to catch our own football, since many of us were behind these incarnations you already used at home.
We established Pryon to solve a persistent but surmountable problem impacting enterprises across every industry. We call it knowledge friction: the disconnect between buried, high-value content and the people who need to get accurate information quickly to deliver precise work. This challenge was exacerbated by the cloud and mobile revolutions, which enabled an explosion of content that, paradoxically, made information harder for people to find and use. Our team saw an opportunity to create an AI-powered knowledge management solution capable of ingesting then traversing the vast quantity of content available and distilling it down to the sugar packets of information individuals need to make informed decisions.
We established Pryon to solve a problem impacting enterprises across every industry: knowledge friction — the disconnect between buried, high-value content and the people who need to get accurate information quickly.
We created a first-of-its-kind knowledge fabric that weaves together the majority of an organization’s content to extract valuable intelligence and know-how. Pryon unlocks previously impossible-to-find known and tribal knowledge, enabling users to glean precious pearls of wisdom from their unstructured multimodal data. In doing so, we deliver our clients a decision advantage through authoritative, reliable, and verifiable answers.
I’m immensely proud that Pryon is deployed today by Fortune 500 companies and government agencies to reimagine the future of work. You can say that we’re trusted by brands that know better. Unlike consumer-first generative tools, Pryon’s SOC 2-compliant platform was purpose-built for the enterprise. Our novel approach to model building includes computer vision (CV), large language models (LLMs), and proprietary connectors that ensure our platform remains grounded on our four pillars of enterprise AI: accuracy, scalability, security, and speed.
But we don’t stop there. Responsible AI (RAI) is not just an afterthought or a buzzword to us. It’s a commitment that we take very seriously and embedded in our DNA. Because it’s an extrapolation of our last venture, where many of our design decisions were made to ensure personal information like contacts, phone calls, and texts were never revealed — almost a decade before anyone ever talked about ethical AIs.
In the Pryon platform, RAI is represented through four key initiatives:
You can learn more about Pryon’s commitments to RAI in our upcoming webinar series.
As a pioneer in developing enterprise-grade AI solutions, Pryon remains at the tip of the spear because our team is used to operating there. We are inventing technologies that others will name years later as it’s always been. We’re using the resources from our Series B round to support two key developments for Pryon’s continued leadership of AI-enhanced knowledge management: growth and innovation.
We’ll cover more about these exciting initiatives in Part Two of this letter. Or, you can register for our Just Know Now webinar series to be the first to hear about it.
I remember reading Isaac Asimov’s iconic science fiction masterpiece Foundation as a teenager. It inspired me to dream of a world where math could predict the future to prevent catastrophes. We’re on the cusp of having technologies that will allow us to better the world in all our respective disciplines by increasing the magnitude of consumable knowledge. It is in this spirit that we established this venture and now project Pryon into the future.
I want to give special thanks to David Nahamoo, our Chief Scientist, and Chris Mahl, our President and COO. I met David during my days at IBM and still find it surreal that I get to work with an intellect of his caliber. We don’t get to this stage without the top-flight R&D talent that he was able to recruit. Chris represents the other side of the equation as a luminary in commercialization. Given his previous leadership experiences at brands such as Informatica, Oracle, and Salesforce, we’re able to develop a full-spectrum team that deploys AI in a way that’s relevant to organizations, by priority staging outcomes that matter to them.
Thank you to our clients, investors, and partners for their continued and growing confidence in us. Not a day goes by when we’re not thinking about your future needs and wants since we recognize your importance to safeguarding and supporting our communities.
Finally, I’m incredibly grateful to our team of hard-working Pryoneers for all their tireless efforts in reaching this milestone, and I am inspired about where we’re going next. We look forward to sharing more with you in the coming days, weeks, and months.
To learn more about our Series B funding round, read the press release.
Discover how you can eliminate knowledge friction with Pryon. Register for the webinar today.
Today, I’m excited to announce that Pryon closed a $100 million Series B investment round led by Thomas Tull’s US Innovative Technology Fund (USIT). I wanted to share more about this milestone and how it supports our task and purpose. Luckily, I get to do this in writing versus a long-winded speech at the Oscars!
Firstly, I want to thank the USIT team for their vote of confidence and for the Breyer Capital team who introduced us. Breyer and Revolution’s Rise of the Rest Seed Fund co-led our Series A in 2019 together with Digital Alpha Advisors and Greycroft. Beyond them, we wouldn’t be here today if it wasn’t for the years of support conferred to us since inception by BootstrapLabs, Carolina Angel Network, Engage Ventures, Gaingels, Good Growth Capital, Micron Ventures, Piedmont Capital Partners, Rex Health Ventures, Steel Perlot, Two Sigma Ventures, and a myriad of others. It certainly wasn’t a sure thing when they joined our cap table, yet they were able to see what we saw with conviction that entire industries would be disrupted by artificial intelligence (AI).
USIT’s dual-use mission backs ventures like Pryon that serve both commercial and public sectors. They recognize our technology as an essential element of a global-spanning digital supply chain that supports critical infrastructure, something that the pandemic laid bare. It’s become clear that what we’ve been working towards will become a mandatory part of the enterprise software stack well before the end of this decade. At the risk of sounding too folksy, it’s truly a blessing to be working with all involved since we align on multiple levels. Our backers called this market early and cannot be described as fair-weather friends, since they first invested prior to generative AI (GAI) hitting the mainstream.
In 2007, at the inaugural TechCrunch Disrupt conference in San Francisco, an event lampooned on HBO’s comedy Silicon Valley, I pulled a flip phone out of my jacket pocket and spoke into it, my words being transcribed by the world’s first ever cloud-based speech recognition (ASR) engine. A second later, a response was uttered out loud via the world’s first cloud-based text to speech (TTS) engine. And… crickets. Nobody knew what the heck I was showing them. What I was not allowed to reveal at the time is that we were secretly working with Apple on a prototype of Siri, years before an iPhone that could support that capability even existed. Five years later, my previous venture, Yap, was acquired by Amazon as their first ever AI-related M&A. There, it would form the nucleus of Alexa and the race was on to permeate AI into our personal lives. We were ahead of our time, as our engine had an implementation of neural networks before the famed research papers that came out in succeeding years.
I then started thinking about how AI would eventually come to our workplaces. Yet, by 2017, I remained surprised by how underdeveloped it still was in intensive enterprise environments, especially given more recent and significant discoveries in transformers-based architectures. It was clear from our backgrounds that the experience of asking a question and getting an instantaneous answer was groundbreaking in the consumer world. However, this capability was missing in academic, corporate, government, and nonprofit environments. So, I recruited key practitioners in our field and adjacent fields out of Big Tech and rounded up the team to catch our own football, since many of us were behind these incarnations you already used at home.
We established Pryon to solve a persistent but surmountable problem impacting enterprises across every industry. We call it knowledge friction: the disconnect between buried, high-value content and the people who need to get accurate information quickly to deliver precise work. This challenge was exacerbated by the cloud and mobile revolutions, which enabled an explosion of content that, paradoxically, made information harder for people to find and use. Our team saw an opportunity to create an AI-powered knowledge management solution capable of ingesting then traversing the vast quantity of content available and distilling it down to the sugar packets of information individuals need to make informed decisions.
We established Pryon to solve a problem impacting enterprises across every industry: knowledge friction — the disconnect between buried, high-value content and the people who need to get accurate information quickly.
We created a first-of-its-kind knowledge fabric that weaves together the majority of an organization’s content to extract valuable intelligence and know-how. Pryon unlocks previously impossible-to-find known and tribal knowledge, enabling users to glean precious pearls of wisdom from their unstructured multimodal data. In doing so, we deliver our clients a decision advantage through authoritative, reliable, and verifiable answers.
I’m immensely proud that Pryon is deployed today by Fortune 500 companies and government agencies to reimagine the future of work. You can say that we’re trusted by brands that know better. Unlike consumer-first generative tools, Pryon’s SOC 2-compliant platform was purpose-built for the enterprise. Our novel approach to model building includes computer vision (CV), large language models (LLMs), and proprietary connectors that ensure our platform remains grounded on our four pillars of enterprise AI: accuracy, scalability, security, and speed.
But we don’t stop there. Responsible AI (RAI) is not just an afterthought or a buzzword to us. It’s a commitment that we take very seriously and embedded in our DNA. Because it’s an extrapolation of our last venture, where many of our design decisions were made to ensure personal information like contacts, phone calls, and texts were never revealed — almost a decade before anyone ever talked about ethical AIs.
In the Pryon platform, RAI is represented through four key initiatives:
You can learn more about Pryon’s commitments to RAI in our upcoming webinar series.
As a pioneer in developing enterprise-grade AI solutions, Pryon remains at the tip of the spear because our team is used to operating there. We are inventing technologies that others will name years later as it’s always been. We’re using the resources from our Series B round to support two key developments for Pryon’s continued leadership of AI-enhanced knowledge management: growth and innovation.
We’ll cover more about these exciting initiatives in Part Two of this letter. Or, you can register for our Just Know Now webinar series to be the first to hear about it.
I remember reading Isaac Asimov’s iconic science fiction masterpiece Foundation as a teenager. It inspired me to dream of a world where math could predict the future to prevent catastrophes. We’re on the cusp of having technologies that will allow us to better the world in all our respective disciplines by increasing the magnitude of consumable knowledge. It is in this spirit that we established this venture and now project Pryon into the future.
I want to give special thanks to David Nahamoo, our Chief Scientist, and Chris Mahl, our President and COO. I met David during my days at IBM and still find it surreal that I get to work with an intellect of his caliber. We don’t get to this stage without the top-flight R&D talent that he was able to recruit. Chris represents the other side of the equation as a luminary in commercialization. Given his previous leadership experiences at brands such as Informatica, Oracle, and Salesforce, we’re able to develop a full-spectrum team that deploys AI in a way that’s relevant to organizations, by priority staging outcomes that matter to them.
Thank you to our clients, investors, and partners for their continued and growing confidence in us. Not a day goes by when we’re not thinking about your future needs and wants since we recognize your importance to safeguarding and supporting our communities.
Finally, I’m incredibly grateful to our team of hard-working Pryoneers for all their tireless efforts in reaching this milestone, and I am inspired about where we’re going next. We look forward to sharing more with you in the coming days, weeks, and months.
To learn more about our Series B funding round, read the press release.
Discover how you can eliminate knowledge friction with Pryon. Register for the webinar today.
Read this guide to:
Government agencies need to ensure employees, service members, and citizens quickly and easily receive the answers they need to drive productivity and enable decision advantage.
Internal content authors work diligently to produce and update content, including policies, procedures, and lessons learned. Yet staff, managers, and senior leaders still lose valuable time wading through pools of siloed information to find answers. As a result, the gap between critical information and those who need it most continues to widen.
Government agencies need to ensure employees, service members, and citizens quickly and easily receive the answers they need to drive productivity and enable decision advantage.
With the right GenAI solutions in place, staff and service members can take on challenges with greater speed and intelligence.
Not every GenAI solution on the market is fit to meet the specific needs of government agencies. Implementing GenAI in a regulated environment requires careful consideration of four critical factors to ensure success:
Many federal agencies are turning to Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) to support their GenAI solutions. RAG is a framework that combines retrieval and generative capabilities to deliver accurate and trustworthy responses.
This approach mitigates common issues with GenAI tools, such as hallucinations and ensures that responses are based on authoritative content with clear source attribution.
