Capacity offers businesses an AI-driven platform that uses organizational knowledge to automate various processes. The startup today raised $11 million after tripling revenue in 2020.
Most enterprises have to wrangle myriad data buckets, some of which inevitably become underused or forgotten. A Forrester survey found that between 60% and 73% of all data within corporations is never analyzed for insights or larger trends. The opportunity cost of this unused data is substantial, with a Veritas report pegging it $3.3 trillion by 2020 if the current trend holds. That’s perhaps why the corporate sector has taken an interest in cognitive search and robotic process automation products that ingest, understand, organize, and act on digital content from multiple digital sources.
Capacity’s software learns from knowledge and interactions within a business to build a knowledge base that automates help desks, workflows, and decisions. Whenever multiple answers to a question are found within the knowledge base, Capacity provides alerts to verify which answer is correct and attempts to discern whether it’s relevant to particular team members.
Capacity organizes tacit knowledge with folders, dialogues, exchanges, and universal drag-and-drop, letting users set access permissions by department, role, geolocation, team, website visitor, and more. Documents and spreadsheets are knowledge-mined, and companies can connect to existing directories for convenience, using a console called CoPilot to filter, organize, and respond to inbound inquiries and create guided conversations.
Employees can reply to, forward, or dismiss any questions Capacity can’t automatically answer via a live chat or a support ticket. (Capacity says over time, fewer and fewer questions will require human-in-the-loop intervention.) A feature called Broadcasts enables these employees to also schedule and send companywide messages through their preferred communication channels.
Meanwhile, Capacity’s Workflows product leverages robotic process automation to organize operations. Workflows are built on a series of human-powered and automated tasks and tap Capacity’s third-party app store for extended functionality.
“Chris Sims and I had an idea for the company based on a couple of ideas: (1) The thought that in the modern office, we waste so much time looking for information, (2) it can take 23 minutes and 15 seconds to get back to where you left off after interruption, and (3) all of a company’s intelligence lives in three — and only three — places: your apps, your documents, and the minds of your team,” CEO David Karandish, who cofounded Capacity in 2017 with Sims as part of the Equity incubator, explained to VentureBeat via email. “Capacity empowers customers and employees alike to find the information they’re searching for and kick off workflows independently.”
Karandish says Capacity has 50 customers and over 100,000 internal users, including Maryville University, Iredell-Statesville School District, and West Community Credit Union. Maryville’s Capacity bot Max answered hundreds of student inquiries about the upcoming term, while Iredell-Statesville’s implementation is automating question-answering to the tune of over 7,000 inquiries per week.
Rice Park Capital Management contributed to Capacity’s new round. The series C brings the startup’s total raised to $36.4 million, which Karandish notes has primarily been secured or reinvested from initial investors, angel investors, customers, and friends, primarily from Midwest sources.
