Paris-based custom AI assistants platform Dust secures €14.9M from Sequoia, Seedcamp, others

Paris-based Dust, a startup building custom AI assistants to speed up work, announced that it has secured $16M (nearly €14.95M) in a fresh round of funding led by Sequoia with participation from investors like XYZ, GG1, Connect Ventures, Seedcamp, and Motier Ventures.

The Dust platform has also reached a milestone of $1M in annual recurring revenue (ARR), boasting an engagement metric with 70 per cent weekly active users (WAU) to monthly active users (MAU), comparable to platforms like Slack.

What is Dust trying to solve?

According to Dust, recruiters seek AI assistants to draft job descriptions and review candidate cover letters. Engineers need assistants who understand the company’s codebase and can help resolve incidents using the latest runbooks. 

Sales teams want personalised meeting transcripts linked to Salesforce accounts and updated objection handling battle cards. Sales operations require assistants to generate SQL queries independently of the analytics team. Dust’s mission is to get work to work better. 

Founded in February 2023, Dust’s platform lets teams design and deploy specialised AI assistants with context on the company’s knowledge. 

It leverages “leading” models from Anthropic, Google, OpenAI, and Mistral to create practical tools for recruiters, engineers, sales teams, and sales operations, enabling them to perform specialised tasks and streamline workflows.

Stanislas Polu, co-founder of Dust, says, “As a “GenAI native” company, we believe in highly focused assistants that can act as practical tools, not just general-purpose question-answering gadgets.”

The company helps teams deploy tailored AI assistants, ready for internal sharing, while supporting a unified platform to manage costs, limit security dependencies, and accelerate value creation, addressing concerns about security risks and internal knowledge silos.

Co-founder Polu, adds, “One platform for all, but not one-size-fits-all assistants” has allowed us to see strong and sustained adoption at hundreds of fast-moving customers, including teams like Watershed, Alan, Qonto, and Pennylane. We’ve learned with our customers that a team of AI assistants excelling at specific tasks outperforms a single assistant attempting many tasks poorly.”

“We’ve also found that a unified platform for designing and hosting these assistants accelerates company-wide deployment, spanning the numerous functions poised to benefit from generative AI’s productivity gains.”

“70% of monthly active Dust users are active weekly, a figure that’s on par with amazing tools like Slack and underlines Dust’s ability to become a core part of recurring workflows.”