The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Atlanta AI startup raises $30.5M
Sema4.ai CEO: ‘I want to build the biggest and greatest software tech company that Georgia has ever seen.’
Sema4.ai, an Atlanta-based artificial intelligence startup, is making a splashy debut.
The startup was quietly created in November, but this week it announced three things: 1: It exists. 2: It has raised a $30.5 million Series A investment. And 3: It has acquired Finnish automation platform Robocorp.
In a tech funding world that’s seen the financing spigots tighten the past couple of years amid higher interest rates and stricter lending standards, Sema4.ai’s Series A investment, which is typically the first investment capital a company raises after seed and angel investing, is a sizable cash injection into a Georgia company. In 2023, only five Atlanta-based companies raised more, according to an analysis of Crunchbase data, and those companies were all at least four years old.
Sema4.ai was founded by four former executives of data analytics
company California-based Cloudera. They decided to launch their own startup because they saw customers “wanted to graduate from just having insights about data to be able to have actionable execution around those use cases,” said Rob Bearden, CEO of Sema4.ai and former Cloudera chief executive.
The startup’s funding came primarily from two established California-based venture capital firms, Benchmark and Mayfield, that have previously funded Atari, eBay, Twitter (now known as X), Uber and Lyft.
“I was happy to finance it myself, but it’s always great to have the smartest guys in the world on the investor side around the table,” Bearden said. His relationship with Benchmark goes back more than 20 years.
Moving beyond ChatGPT
Sema4.ai is focused on helping businesses use AI in their processes in a way that adds value to their business, but that some of the more popular AI services don’t do now.
“ChatGPT is interesting, but you know, it’s about document creation,” Bearden said. “It doesn’t really deliver an enterprise value-creating use case.”
Sema4.ai is hoping to create that value for businesses through a data platform that is slated to launch in six to nine months and will be deployed using Robocorp’s technology. Bearden said they will be starting by helping banks use artificial intelligence in compliance, like fraud detection in transactions.
“The bank can have automated point-to-point red flag notifications that then a human has to go through,” Bearden said. “We have the ability now to either take the complexity out of that for the human and automate that for the human or, quite frankly, even eliminate the human from doing it.”
The startup is entering into an increasingly crowded marketplace of AI companies at a time when both excitement and fear of the technology are rising. In a 2022 Pew Research study, 37% of Americans said they were more concerned than excited about the increased use of AI in daily life, while 45% were equally concerned and excited. Those who are more concerned said they were worried about potential loss of jobs, privacy issues and misuse of the technology, among other things.
The potential of Sema4.ai eliminating a human from bank fraud detection could stoke the fears that AI is going to take over people’s jobs, but Bearden said “what we’ve found through the course of our career is it allows that human to be redeployed to do other things.”
He added that the technology is meant to make workers more efficient and able to make more accurate decisions.
Sema4.ai’s business model is consumption-based, meaning it charges clients based on the number of times the product is used, though Bearden declined to disclose what it will be charging.
Bearden also declined to disclose the purchase price for Robocorp. He was an early investor in the company.
Sema4.ai will open its headquarters in the Tower Place office in Buckhead shortly after Easter, according to Bearden. The company currently has about 60 employees, the bulk of whom came over with the acquisition of Robocorp. By the end of the year, Sema4.ai plans to hire an additional 35 to 45 people, primarily engineers, sales and product employees, some of whom will be based in Atlanta, Bearden said.
He and his co-founders decided to build the startup in Atlanta because, he said, it’s a great place to recruit and to do business.
“I want to build the biggest and greatest software tech company that Georgia has ever seen,” Bearden said.