Akooda

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Founders: Yuval (Goncho) Gonczarowski
Founding: 2020
Mission: We help large organizations figure out what the heck is going on in their company
Employees: 16 & 10% Local
Workplace: Hybrid
Stage & Capital Raised: Seed & $11M raised
Investors: NFX, Atlassian Ventures,  New Era Capital, Village Global, Founder Collective, Flybridge Capital, Argon Ventures, Two Lanterns, and Oceans Ventures, as well as several leading industry experts
Key Customers: AB InBev, Redox, Lambent, Secureframe, RevenueBase and banks, hedge funds, healthcare, and other financial institutions
Glassdoor Rating: N/A
Valuation: N/A

Akooda is the world’s first Operations Intelligence software, leveraging AI, to help large organizations figure out what the heck is going on internally with their operations. Yuval (Goncho) Gonczarowski was a former Apple Prototype Engineer and McKinsey consultant who saw the struggles large scale organizations encounter up close. 

Let’s say the uncomfortable part out loud. Large organizations often have no idea what’s going on inside of their own companies. With the rapid adoption of SaaS tools, some reports say modern tech-forward global orgs are using an average of 130 applications (src). While each tool is tailored to meet the specific needs of a department and bring efficiency to various functional domains, the downside is that these tools operate in silos. 

In 2020, Gal Abramovitz and Itamar Niddam teamed up with Yuval to start Akooda to help bridge this tooling gap. Gal and Itamar come from well established backgrounds in Israel’s elite intelligence units and different high tech companies that focused on security, algorithms and data. 

With a seamless 2-click integration, Akooda connects to the company’s existing SaaS applications and ingests them into its proprietary engine. This engine breaks down each platform’s building blocks and rebuilds them into a meaningful narrative of events so that clients can ask targeted questions about their business. Akooda then identifies the most frequently occurring cultural terms, the ones unique to any specific organization like industry-specific terms, project names, feature names, customer names, and more – learning the internal lexicon and taxonomy of the organization’s internal footprint.

Akooda explores Slack discussions, Jira tickets, calendar invitations, documents, and includes links that drill down to each specific item. Their platform offers insights and measures sentiment like the level of effort and focus an organization dedicates to specific data points across their company. It also reveals which individuals worked on specific projects, showcasing their connections and creating a full mapping of the organization. 

The Akooda engine maps datasets to optimize organizational performance not previously measured. They’re measuring updates and discussion notes across meetings, chat platforms, and email to create an additional layer of critical information, all in an effort to help collaboration and make space for more informed strategic decision making.

Data Security and Privacy are not an afterthought at Akooda, but rather at the core of their technology and the way they design and build their products. With technical teams coming from the world’s leading cybersecurity companies, their customers spanning various industries, from robotics and insurance to healthcare and fintech feel comfortable giving Akooda access to their most sensitive assets, their data.

In that light, Akooda does not actually access, store or maintain a company’s data. Instead, they use metadata for tagging and ingest only data that the dashboard owner already has access to, based on existing privacy settings in the connected tools. Akooda does not bypass existing privacy permissions.

Akooda spent their first year with a core team building out the tool. And with less than a year on the market, they’ve already signed up 30+ customers in a variety of industries including financial institutions, VCs, banks, healthcare, insurance, technology, consumer goods companies, and more. They were recently named to NFX’s The AI Hot 75 list and will continue to focus on the growth of their GTM and R&D teams into 2024.

Operators to Know:

My investigative powers continue to need work so apologies to the Akooda team if I missed any up & coming operators internally

Key Roles To Be Hired:

  • More roles coming soon!

If I were interviewing here are some questions I’d ask:

  • With the explosion of AI tools in the Enterprise, how does that change the competitive landscape for Akooda?
  • What is the long term vision for Akooda?
  • What are the biggest challenges as you scale the team past 20 employees?
  • What are the most important roles you’ll be looking to add in 2023 // teams that need the most help? 

We’re optimizing for readability here so to learn more about Akooda you’ll have to D.Y.O.R. I’m excited to watch this team bring more businesses into the AI age. All businesses applaud your efforts. See you around town and the internet beyond!

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