Zive, a new startup aiming to untangle companies' data, has raised $3.2 million in pre-seed funding.
The German startup was founded in 2023 by the team behind Haiilo, a bootstrapped employee intranet business that was sold to private equity group Marlin Equity Partners for €10 million ($11 million) in 2020.
Now, with Zive, the team wants to use generative AI to make the large amounts of unstructured data companies hold more accessible.
Based in Hamburg, Zive wants to reduce employees from using multiple applications in their workplace, which can be a time-consuming and manual process. Typically, employees rarely use company intranets, and information is often outdated, with 80% of businesses' data being unstructured, Jan Marius Marquardt, cofounder and CEO at Zive, told Business Insider.
The company uses various large language models, or LLMs, alongside its proprietary knowledge graph to help users search, understand, and view information.
"We were looking to rethink knowledge management, and then came gen AI," Marquardt said.
"If you look at the big data game, it's been played to an end but not in unstructured data. AI is the greatest productivity promise of the century. However, employees need a reliable AI platform that draws on a company's existing knowledge and provides trustworthy answers while ensuring full data security," he added.
Using LLMs, Zive's platform retrieves information from queries via plugins with data sources within a business that includes email, messaging, and customer relationship management platforms. The company has built integrations to existing platforms such as SAP, Salesforce, and Jira, which are synced to employee permissions.
Zive's $3.2 million pre-seed funding was led by Headline at a $11.5 million valuation. The funding will go toward hiring the company's tech and product teams while operating a remote-first approach.
The company claims to have reached an annual recurring revenue of $110,000 after a few months of operation. Its pitch deck lists Elastic, an American-Dutch software company, and Microsoft as competitors.
Check out Zive's 14-slide pre-seed pitch deck, shared exclusively with Business Insider, below: