Bend-based serial entrepreneur Fritz Brumder is back with a new startup, an AI company called WiseOx.
Proceeds from the sale of his last company, Zipcan, a video chat provider, are helping fund the new venture.
WiseOx creates AI assistants trained on a customer’s specific data. Customers create their own assistant, or "mascot," which is made smarter by questions asked by the user. Answers are informed by the customer's own data.
“It’s less a chat bot and more similar to how I’ve built software in the past. It’s tools that can be embedded and integrated into a customer ecosystem,” said Brumder.
WiseOx uses OpenAI technology, though not the ChatGPT product, to understand what a user has queried. The query is sent to WiseOx's training database where the answer is translated into natural language using an OpenAI tool.
“We use the language understanding (technology) from OpenAI,” Brumder said.
Brumder previously founded video platform Brandlive. He left Brandlive in 2020 and founded Zipcan later that year. Zipcan, which allows customers to add video chat to websites, took off during the Covid-19 pandemic. It was acquired for an undisclosed amount in December 2021.
Brumder co-founded WiseOx with Andy Brown and Spenser Lea. Both previously worked with Brumder as executives at Brandlive. Lea was a co-founder at Zipcan and Brown was a strategic advisor.
WiseOx has a handful of monthly paying customers and another 60 users participating in an early access trial, said Brumder. The company was self-funded until November, when it closed a $500,000 funding round led by Cascade Seed Fund, which was also an investor in Zipcan.
“We are proud to back Fritz a second time. He has brought ‘the band back together’ to launch WiseOx. We invested on the basis of our previous experience as investors with Fritz and team as well as the market opportunity,” said Cascade Managing Director Julie Harrelson. “While AI has matured rapidly over the last year, startups continue to sprinkle AI like ‘fairy dust’ in pitches to attract investors. We invested as we believe WiseOx has identified a plausible application for the technology which is the case for all our portfolio companies.”
Brumder expects WiseOx customers to use their mascots both internally and externally. He noted that one early customer is a senior living organization that has a sales mascot built into their customer relationship management system. If a prospect is interested in certain services, the sales staff can ask the mascot for all the services near a prospect’s location. The mascot can bring up the data and suggest follow-up tasks, said Brumder.
Another customer is a brand consultant that has trained a mascot on their proprietary process to help small businesses create branding guides. The mascot supports customers through the process, he said.
WiseOx has 4 employees, in addition to the three co-founders.
Brumder hopes to attract hundreds of users for free demo accounts and land 15 enterprise customers in the first half of 2024.
He also anticipates more fundraising in the second quarter.
