With more funding and partners, Raleigh AI firm Pryon enters a pivotal year
Before launching Pryon, the Raleigh artificial intelligence startup, Igor Jablokov built some of the technology that would later be used in Amazon’s Alexa smart speaker.
He’s hoping to build something better with Pryon, a virtual assistant platform meant to help businesses process large amounts of information — like documents, communications, web pages and other sources — and allow users to ask any sort of question about it.
He believes it could unleash a wave of productivity for workers, especially as more people begin to work at home alone. Rather than needing to arrange a call with a colleague or spend time researching internal documents or reports, Jablakov has said, a user could consult Pryon and it would deliver an answer via text or voice.
Whether or not Pryon catches on, however, remains to be seen. But the next year will prove to be pivotal, as it begins an effort to build out a customer base for its virtual assistant.
The company’s efforts received a boost in the past few months, though, as Pryon raised a fresh round of funding and nabbed more influential investors.
In its latest round, the company raised $12 million and brought on investors, like the data storage company Micron’s venture capital arm, former IBM CEO Samuel J. Palmisano and the venture capital arm of UNC Rex Healthcare.
Andrew Byrnes, of Micron Ventures, said companies are increasingly looking for help managing data, as the amount of information each individual has access to is growing exponentially.
All of that information, he added, can be spread out, making it hard for a decision maker to access needed information quickly. What makes Pryon stand out, he said, is it makes that information easier to find.
“The ease of use of their platform is orders of magnitude greater than other enterprise AI knowledge management systems,” Byrnes told The News & Observer. That “give(s) them a significant advantage to be the tool businesses use to access the data needed trapped inside knowledge silos.”
Jablokov told The N&O in an interview that Pryon’s latest round wasn’t so much about the dollar amount, as getting more access to potential industries it can sell to. The startup has previously raised $24.5 million.
“We have plenty to runway for a year-plus,” Jablokov said over Zoom. “We’re operating in full-on operations mode now, building up our go-to-market capabilities in order to trigger a much larger growth round sometime next year.”
Building out a sales team
But to do that, Pryon will have to build out a sales operation for the first time. The company is turning to Chris Mahl, an industry veteran, to do that.
Mahl, recently named Pryon’s president and chief revenue officer, has previously helped run sales at tech companies like Oracle, Salesforce and Informatica. At Salesforce and Informatica, in particular, Mahl was among the earliest of employees.
And just like at those companies, Mahl said, his focus over the next year will be to find one to three industries for Pryon to focus and grow on.
“If you and I were sitting on the good ship Pryon, and we looked at the compass, and said, ‘Which direction can we go?’ The answer is all of them,” Mahl said over Zoom. “So one of the wonderful challenges of the company is, let’s pick a few. Which ones do we really want to concentrate, because we don’t have 500 employees?
“It was the same thing with Salesforce or Informatica,” he added. “We didn’t go after every vertical and every use case.”
Finding potential customers
It remains to be seen what use cases will initially win out, thought the company plans to announce some of its first customers next year.
But Jablokov noted that many of its investors could “seem like potential customers of ours.”
One company, Georgia-Pacific, is already in production with Pryon through a collaboration with the Atlanta venture capital fund called Engage Ventures, which was one of Pryon’s first investors.
And Byrnes, of Micron’s venture capital arm, said his company is working on some collaborations with Pryon.
But even before it has nabbed many paying customers, Jablokov said, Pryon is already attracting looks from would-be buyers.
“We know that we have something special,” he said. “Because we’re ready getting (merger and acquisition) signals, which are a nice pat on the head, but it doesn’t mean that’s what we want to happen. I think we can build something of consequence.”
This story was produced with financial support from a coalition of partners led by Innovate Raleigh as part of an independent journalism fellowship program. The N&O maintains full editorial control of the work. Learn more; go to bit.ly/newsinnovate
This story was originally published November 24, 2021 at 9:00 AM with the headline "With more funding and partners, Raleigh AI firm Pryon enters a pivotal year."
