Beyond Work raises $2.5M to build human-ai work platform

Christian Lanng, CEO and co-founder of $2 billion enterprise Tradeshift is heading up a cracking team of founders including Joakim Recht, former Distinguished Engineer at Uber, Mikkel Bo Schmidt, former Head of Design at Tradeshift, Kate Kharchenko, Customer Success at Stack Overflow, and Malte Højmark-Bertelsen, former Head of AI and Data Science at KMD, and they are building what they are calling a 'human AI work platform' - Beyond Work. 

Leveraging LLMs from scratch, Beyond Work is building a new kind of 'application and day-to-day experience that is enterprise-safe and revolutionary' with Fortune 500 customers. To find out more about exactly what all this means Tech.eu had a word with Lanng. 

Not one to mince his words, Lanng points out that, to date, enterprise software has rather caused an issue rather than solved it in recent years. 

"Enterprise software has failed - I've been selling enterprise software for fourteen years so I recognise the conflict in that statement, but in the last fourteen years, the promise of SaaS, cloud computing and enterprise software was always to make things simpler, easier and to optimise things, make them smarter. But the reality is every company in the world now has much more enterprise software than they had before," says Lanng. 

So, what exactly is it that Beyond Work is building, and why will it be any different?

"We are building the next generation of work automation. Leveraging AI as a core engine and we're doing it in a way where we try to make work a lot more fun, a lot more engaging, and also to remove a lot of the tedious labour that is in every digital job today," he says. “There's a lot of demos right now - there's a lot of 'hype' in AI. We’re taking a much more 'measured' approach - it's going to set us apart in the current landscape."

"Beyond Work is going to be a paradigm shift. Instead of sitting every day and clicking buttons in different applications, maybe you can just tell your computer what you want it to do for you - like a friendly co-worker," he says.

The start-up has raised $2.5 million in a Pre-seed funding which was led by Moonfire Ventures, with co-investment from MIT-affiliated fund E14. Funds will go to R&D. 

The build is in Europe, something that Lanng is proud can happen on his native continent. 

“I just spent fourteen years in California, in Silicon Valley, and it feels really great to have been able to put a team together in Europe and start something in Europe. And I think if you go back fourteen years, that was almost impossible – but today with the infrastructure on the ground and access to talent resources - a lot of talent we helped grow, of course - but it's really been different and we are super excited about doing here," he says.

Speaking of AI in Europe I did ask Lanng if he thought the likes of Mistral AI (the French start-up that raised a €105 million Seed round) would be any kind of a rival to Beyond Work in the future, given software firms are keen to use bolt-on AI's where possible. 

"Mistral AI is led by a super powerful team, but I don't know how much the world is going to change if we have a fourth option (of OpenAI). Of course, competition is great for everyone who uses these platforms but in perspective, we think it's about the real-world use cases and delivering value - not just building yet another platform," adds Lanng.