Our story so far. From Kickstarter to €650k funding.
This is taken from an original post on the 4YFN website, the startup conference and part of Mobile World Congress where we’ll be launching our Beta on February 27th. We’ll also be on-stage as part of the 4YFN Awards, where we’ve been selected as one of the top 8 startups in our category.
“Hu:toma started out as our CEO’s personal project to help his son speak English, without an Italian accent! Whilst working for Amazon in the US, leading their Machine Learning development team for Amazon Go, Maurizio decided to put his skills to use on this side project.
He wondered if he could build an AI that would fit inside a toy that his son could play with and train it using film scripts. Could the AI imitate a character from a film and help his son speak English? Yes, it could, and it worked!
A Kickstarter project followed, forming Hu:toma along with Maurizio’s brother Andrea. The company was successively scouted and accepted onto the Startupbootcamp IoT and Data program in Barcelona.
Startupbootcamp helped Hu:toma shape the product into a commercial prospect and iterate towards a new value proposition. Together we saw the potential application within almost all customer-facing domains. Customer Support, Customer On-boarding, Staff-Training, Sales or Lead Generation can all be delivered through a conversational interface powered by Hu:toma’s technology.
However being hackers at heart, Maurizio and Andrea wanted to leave the individual creation of bots up to external developers. Instead, Hu:toma would provide the tools and platform to build and share conversational AIs.
Hu:toma’s aim is to democratise access to deep learning conversational technology which meant building the Bot Store. A marketplace that brings together AI creators and those wanting to leverage pre-built AIs. Users can create, find an audience, and monetize their products, whilst companies can to scale business processes and empower their staff to do higher value tasks through the automation of mundane tasks. Freelancers , corporates, and agency AI creators can mix’n’match the functionalities of pre-build AIs trained by domain experts.
Following the media attention that we generated by being featured in TechCrunch and Wired after the 4YFN 2016 event, plus an incredible amount of hard work, Hu:toma successfully raised €650k in pre-seed funding.
In late 2016, the first major enterprise client was signed too. With funding in place, Maurizio set about hiring an engineering team, which is now nine strong made up primarily of former Amazon, Microsoft and Google engineers, as well as a growth team made up of former Uber and Startupbootcamp go-getters.
Today Hu:toma are busy fine tuning the platform, getting it ready for public launch at this years’ 4YFN 2017, acting on feedback from waitlist members and beta users. Unlike existing competitors, Hu:toma AIs can be trained to understand multi-turn dialogues without coding or needing to manually build conversation trees or grammar rules. AI creation is greatly simplified because the platform can ingest unstructured text.
All you need to create an AI with Hu:toma is to upload a text training file.
Come and see us at booth E2.5 or K3.10 at 4YFN 2017 and help us out by up-voting on Product Hunt on February 27th.
