A Momentous Announcement
Introducing Momentum.
When we founded Moda AI in 2022, we were focused on how we could enable new, natively multi-modal AI experiences. The emergence and application of Transformers opened the door to exciting new products and services that understood images and text in the same shared brain. We thought, and continue to think, that real world impact will be made by this shared understanding, largely because that’s how we as humans experience and interact with the world.
Going down that path, we built out an incredibly performant search system that blended an understanding of these two modalities, and focused our product offering and GTM on e-commerce. From a technical stand point, e-commerce product discovery was a perfect fit for the technology as product details are inherently multi-modal; a discovery system that looks at only text or images misses quite a bit, leading to frustrating customer experiences and a lack of conversion. We evolved this system into much more than search with a conversational layer, ShopGPT, the first conversational product discovery system. We were privileged to work with a number of fantastic retailers to deliver this experience for their customers. The reality we faced though is that search systems are very challenging to replace and the jury is still out on the retailer side with how best to employ conversational commerce.
As a result, we’ve been re-focusing our efforts toward skating to where the puck will be, leveraging the cutting-edge work we’ve done with natively multi-modal AI. We’re excited to announce our new product, Momentum, which enables you to program your computer with natural language to automate your team’s daily, mundane tasks.
Vision
As we dove into workflow automation, we opened our eyes to how much of our time we spend bogged down by cumbersome software processes. We frequently found ourselves as founders having to complete some wildly repetitive, mundane workflow. Not only were these processes slow, but they were draining and took us away from our most impactful work. We often asked ourselves “what if we could just write a script for this” and have the software work for us, rather than force ourselves to work for the software.
Much has been written about how AI will power industry specific workflows. We agree with this. However, the reality is that building industry specific AI solutions requires either managing deep integration with existing vertical software providers or building a superset of features and requiring customers to rip and replace their existing software stacks. Consider a real estate brokerage that wants to enable AI capabilities for their compliance workflow. They can either try to build custom integrations with their existing transaction management solution or wait for someone to build a full fledged, AI first transaction management system. Both of these options come with serious limitations.
What if customers could add AI without changing their existing systems? This is exactly what we are enabling with Momentum. Momentum enables customers, like the real estate brokerage above, to leverage the power of AI while avoiding the pain caused by replacing their existing, deeply embedded systems.
RPA systems do exist to help automate these types of repetitive tasks, but today’s solutions are brittle and difficult to implement. We believe the future of RPA will be built from the ground up to natively harness AI, lowering the barrier to entry, rooting it in deployment flexibility, and unlocking previously impossible automations. Our goal is to build the software that eliminates the mundane work millions of people find themselves doing on their computers daily. Quantitatively, our north star is to enable automation of the equivalent of 200 million person hours within the next five years.
The vision of eliminating the friction involved with software processes is also personal. My father, who passed away last year after a twenty year battle with Parkinson’s, worked on the earliest AI technologies at MIT in the 60s. Toward the end of his life, Parkinson’s made it incredibly challenging for him to use the computers that he helped lay the foundation for. An intelligent software execution system would have eliminated the hoops he had to jump through in order to interact with computing. We at Momentum envision a world where better, smarter software eliminates that friction.
What to Expect
Today, we’re excited to announce that we have a working alpha of our AI enabled automation tool. It runs natively on macOS and allows you to automate workflows that run on your actual computer. We’re starting to use it internally everyday for our own tasks! Our initial test slots are full, but if you want to try it out, we’d love to see you on the waitlist. In the meantime, check out some of the demo videos we’ve put together of the system working today, on our website.
Over the next weeks and months, we are going to continue improving the performance, both quality and latency, of the system’s brain. We’re also enabling better security and privacy by moving more AI inference to the device. Lastly, we’re starting to partner with companies that want to 10x the performance of their existing automations or introduce automation into their existing workflows. If you fall into this camp, we would love to hear from you.
Long term, we’re hoping to lay the technical foundation to enable everyone to get back to spending time doing what they love and are great at. This involves a system that bridges the gap between programmatic and human interaction with software systems. This is a tall task!
Looking Forward
As part of this product shift, we’re also changing our company name itself to Momentum. We quite like it because it speaks to the greater mission of enabling our customers to gain velocity and mass by reducing friction, and it speaks to what we want the culture of our team to embody.
We’re incredibly grateful for the continued support from our investment team, led by Mike Volpi at Index Ventures, Linus Liang at Kyber Knight Capital, and John Vrionis at Unusual Ventures.
If your company has an existing automation process you think could be 10x better or you wish you could understand how to implement UIPath but can’t, please reach out to me at [email protected]. We’re deeply focused and passionate about enabling this transformation for other businesses and want to hear how we can work together.
We’re actively hiring for impactful roles in our Jackson Square/SF office. If the message and vision in this document resonate with you, please don’t hesitate to email me at [email protected] to set up a time to chat. We have a great team, fantastic investors, and are building momentum – we’d be thrilled to talk with you.
If you’ve read this far, thank you. We’re incredibly excited about the direction and what we’re going to help enable. Again, If you want to be involved in any way or are just curious, shoot me an email – I’d love to chat.