I wrote a lot of today’s edition in the new Dia browser from The Browser Company, which launched in beta yesterday.

I previously relied on their excellent Arc browser, but I’m impressed by Dia so far. It’s presented more like a conventional browser, but with a built-in AI assistant to help you do more on the web.

Yes, AI is increasingly built into everything. And if you’re building an AI tool, there’s a chance someone like OpenAI is going to put the same thing you’re building straight into ChatGPT before you can even get going.

That’s kind of happened to today’s startup, after OpenAI launched similar functionality within a week of their launch. The full version of today’s profile (for Premium members!) explores how Laami can counter that challenge. Read on…!

But first:

• Praetura Ventures has revealed the second cohort for its Praeseed programme. Regular PreSeed Now readers will already be familiar with Future Greens and Neuwave Technologies, both of whom we profiled last year.

– Martin

Laami wants to make navigating an ocean of data simple for SMEs

Businesses can find themselves using a range of online services from numerous providers. And making sense of all of the data across them all can be a challenge.

That’s where Laami wants to step in with an easy-to-use tool aimed at SMEs, while many similar offerings go for the enterprise market.

“What we are building at Laami is a Siri or ChatGPT for your own business, allowing small and medium sized businesses to ask questions and receive instant responses from across all of their data sources,” says co-founder Jamie Lewis.

“No matter where I've worked, the problem has always existed for me and everyone around me, whereby you have emails, and calendars, and CRM systems, and Slack, and financial software, and AI note-takers, and project management tools, and data is everywhere,” he explains.

“Finding information quickly can be pretty difficult. If you're in a meeting and you just need an answer quickly, trawling through reports, pulling files, and scanning through your emails is just time wasting. So we’re allowing businesses to harness their data in an easier fashion and allowing them to be more productive and efficient.

“That can ultimately help with decision making, and that then lowers costs.”

How it works

Laami supports a range of popular services like Google Drive, Hubspot, Slack, Notion, LinkedIn, Dropbox, and more. Lewis says it’s simple to connect a service, by authenticating your login and then syncing your data.

You then get a familiar AI chatbot interface that allows you to ask questions of the data you’ve connected up across the different services.

“You don't have to go scanning through your inbox for 20 minutes to find that one detail in a thread of 200 emails. You don't need to scroll up through your Slack chats to find when someone said that one comment that you need. You can just find it there,” says Lewis.

“And if you're in a product meeting and you're talking about prices you paid to suppliers three years ago, you don't need to go and pull a report from three years ago, and find that one item. You can just ask Laami and you will get a response in three to five seconds.”

It’s early days for Laami, which launched as an MVP at the start of this month. Lewis says early use cases include a recruitment company accessing information about potential candidates to fill clients’ vacancies, and a manufacturing company being able to easily look up historical customer data on the fly.

Laami is currently priced at between $10 and $150 per month, based on usage levels and storage required.

While the product requires data to be copied to Laami’s servers (in encrypted form), Lewis believes security is robust.

“Everything that we deal with in terms of data is fully encrypted and compliant with both GDPR and ISO, US standards as well. And we can't even see anything. We can just see numbers of files in a system. I can't see any detail, even of my own files,” Lewis says.

“Business owners might ask ‘is my data safe?’ Well, your data is already with a third party. You're just giving us permission to view the data that you're storing in a third party and allowing you to query it.”

The story so far

Lewis started his career in banking. Then, he says, he turned against the industry and started a business helping people sue banks for being sold unsuitable products. “At 22 years old, it was pretty bizarre,” he admits.

After a stint in the IP licensing world, he co-founded a business in the NFT space, back when that was hot. Over time, the business evolved.

“It ended up becoming a venture studio where we would deploy capital into individual projects as businesses, and hire CEOs to run those businesses,” he explains.

With that eventually behind him, Lewis was inspired to solve a pain point in his own life with the founding of Laami.

“It dawned on me that finding information is a real pain point that I've experienced in different size businesses, in different sorts of industries. And here's the advent of AI, the technology that would allow you to solve the problem,” Lewis says.

Laami was recently accepted onto the Jason Calacanis affiliated Founder University pre-accelerator programme, and the product itself launched this month. Lewis says he intentionally skipped a limited, invite-only launch phase.

“I had toyed with the idea of keeping it as a closed product. But at the end of the day, I know it works, I know it's useful, and we're only going to learn the true value of it by getting it out there and getting real, paying customers.”

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