We have some exciting news to share today. Zive has raised $3.2 Million growth capital from Headline, one of the leading European & US venture capital firms. Headline joins us on the mission to develop the de-facto standard for enterprise AI that builds on the vastly unused potential of internal company knowledge.
Turning knowledge into a superpower
80% of all company knowledge is unstructured and scattered all over the workplace1) – it’s chaos. Existing knowledge management tools rely on basic keyword search and the tedious manual curation of content scattered across a growing digital workplace. Today, desk workers use on average 11 different business apps daily, up from just 6 in 20192), and it’s estimated they lose 1.8 hours every day searching and gathering information3). Previous attempts to throw large language models (LLMs) at the problem have shown dissatisfactory results and introduced safety and compliance issues.
Zive combines the power of Generative AI and latest semantic search technology with existing company knowledge, making all your existing knowledge universally accessible to employees and providing them with safe, hallucination-free AI via an intuitive user-interface that works across the web, mobile and desktop. Zive comes with the following modules:
- Zive Search: Empowers employees to find everything through a unified, hyper-personalized search – the "Google for business".
- Zive AI Assistant: Provides secure and reliable Enterprise AI that draws on the full breadth of a company’s knowledge.
- Zive Hub: Presents existing knowledge in a structured way so that employees can explore what's there, based on their access levels.
- APIs enable companies to use all of the above in any of their business apps. Much like Segment does with data, Zive wishes to become the single source of truth for AI applications to access company knowledge and for companies to control the data flow.
Rather than wildly deploying LLMs and the risk of hallucinations that come with them, Zive acts as a middle layer between, on one side, your company’s own departments (like IT, Human Resources, Finance & Legal, etc.) and the documents they create and apps they use (like Slack, Zendesk, HubSpot, Personio, etc.), and on the other side, third-party LLMs like those created by OpenAI and Mistral AI. All of this is hosted in the EU to ensure that the data is treated in compliance with GDPR and AI Act regulations and that no LLM provider has access to any customers’ data.
AI is the greatest productivity promise of the century. However, employees need a reliable AI platform that draws on a company’s existing knowledge and provides trustworthy answers while ensuring full data security. The magic to real productivity gains is not in the choice of a specific LLM but in the ability to securely combine them with what a company already knows. Imagine the productivity gains if all your employees knew what your whole company knows.
Efficient growth
We were able to generate strong traction for Zive in the past months and are seeing increased demand from the market as more and more companies are starting to explore potential use-cases for AI. It is just incredible to see how fast companies are able to launch Zive and the immediate positive effects it has on employee productivity and engagement. We will use the funding to keep accelerating our growth while making sure that we stay ahead in terms of product and service. With our background of being bootstrapped founders, we will make sure to grow Zive efficiently for sustainable long-term growth.
A strong partnership
We are absolutely delighted to have won Headline as our lead investor for this pre-seed round. Convincing Headline to invest at this early stage is a strong validation of our vision and path.
“Enterprise knowledge management is a problem that has long been looking for a solution. Zive solves it and adds an easy way for companies to leverage the best AI models safely and in line with Europe’s high standards. Jan and Piers have built a real, functioning product in a few months, just the two of them on the team and without proper funding. Having backed AI foundational models like Mistral AI, we are excited to partner up with the entrepreneurs who apply them most concretely,” says Jonathan Becker, General Partner at Headline.
So, let's get to work!
