Levity, which has been operating in stealth (until now), is the latest no-code company to throw its wares into the ring, having picked up $1.7 million in pre-seed funding led by Gil Dibner’s Angular Ventures. The Berlin-based startup wants to bring AI-powered workflow automation to anyone, letting knowledge workers automate tedious, repetitive and manual parts of their job without the need to learn how to code.
Suitable for customer service, marketing, operations, HR, and more, Levity has elected to be a horizontal offering from the get-go. Typical repetitive tasks that can be automated include reviewing and categorising documents, images, or text. The premise is that conventional, rule-based automation software isn’t able to automate tasks like these as it requires cognitive abilities, meaning that they are usually done manually. This, of course, is where machine learning come into play.
“We want to solve the problem that people spend so much time at their jobs doing boring, repetitive stuff that can be automated to free up space and time for fun and interesting work,” says Gero Keil, co-founder and CEO. “Even though this is what AI has been promising us for decades, there are very few solutions out there, and even less for non-technical people who can’t code”.
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To that end, Keil says Levity’s entire mission is to help non-technical knowledge workers automate what they couldn’t automate before. Specifically, the startup targets work processes that involve making decisions on unstructured data, such as images, text, PDFs and other documents.
“For example, if a company receives hundreds or thousands of emails from partners and customers with attachments every day, someone typically has to download the attachment, look at it and then decide what to do with it,” explains Keil. “With Levity, they can train their own custom AI on all of the historic data that they have accumulated, and once it has learned from that it seamlessly integrates with their existing tools and workflows e.g. Dropbox, Gmail, Slack etc.”
More broadly, he says there are many companies struggling to “productionize AI” that would really benefit from having an end-to-end platform “that enables them to build their own AI solutions and make them part of their processes”.
Keil argues that Levity’s main competitor is people doing work manually, but concedes that there is crossover with automation machine learning tools, workflow automation offerings, and labelling tools,
“Instead of going deep into every domain of the ML value chain and making the lives of developers and data scientists at large corporations easier, we focus only the most essential bits and pieces, wrap them in simple and enjoyable UX and abstract the rest away,” he says. “That makes us the best for non-developers in small and medium-sized businesses that want to automate previously non automatable processes in the most straightforward way. The people that have the automation problem become the same people that solve the automation problem; it’s a paradigm shift just like what Wix and Squarespace did to websites”.
Adds Gil Dibner, general partner and founder at Angular Ventures, in a statement: “Levity is driving a massive shift that will affect all knowledge workers. By allowing knowledge workers to easily train AI engines, build AI-powered automations, and integrate them into their everyday workflows, Levity is radically democratizing the benefits of AI.”
Alongside Angular, Levity’s other backers include: System.One, Discovery Ventures (founders of SumUp), Martin Henk (founder of Pipedrive) and various additional unnamed angel investors.
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