Oslo, Norway-based AI startup Memory, a startup that builds software to help businesses make better use of their time, announced that it has raised $14M (approx €11.77M) in a fresh round of funding.
In October 2018, Memory raised $5M (approx €4.2M) in a funding round led by Concentric and Investinor, with participation from existing investor SNÖ Ventures. To date, the company has raised $20M (approx €16.8M), including its Seed funding from 500 Startups.
Investors in this round
The investment was led by Melesio and Sanden, with participation from existing investors Investinor, Concentric, and SNÖ Ventures.
Speaking about Melesio and Sanden, Mathias Mikkelsen, Founder and CEO of Memory, says, “We’ve been extremely careful with the investors we’ve brought into the fold and I think that shows by the continued support we’ve received from our existing partners each step of the way. Melesio and Sanden will fit perfectly into that mix; the speed and execution with which the team moves makes them a perfect match. They have made a big impact in the Norwegian startup scene, with excellent journeys in both Kahoot and Boost.ai, and we look forward to building something massive together.”
“Tools for a better future of work”
Memory was founded by its Norwegian CEO, Mathias Mikkelsen, in San Francisco in 2013 when he was just 23-years-old. Mikkelsen turned down the opportunity to join Facebook in order to realise his idea for the company’s first product, Timely. After selling his apartment in Oslo in order to bootstrap the company, Mikkelsen launched in 2014.
Memory’s vision of an AI-enabled future seeks to create tools which solve the abuses of time in the modern workplace. Its first product, Timely, is an AI-powered time tracking and planning tool. Timely has been used by over 500,000 people since first launching in 2014. Moreover, the automatic time tracking tool is currently used by more than 5,000 paying businesses across 160 countries. It enables businesses to salvage the time and money lost every day to inaccurate manual time tracking, by automatically capturing time spent on all work activities and streamlining invoicing, project management, resource allocation, and reporting.
Dewo – a personal assistant for “Deep work”
Besides Timely, the company has recently introduced Dewo, a personal assistant for “deep work”.
Deep work is a concept created by Georgetown Professor Cal Newport, who defines it as: “activities performed in a state of distraction-free concentration that push your cognitive capabilities to their limits.”
In simple terms, deep work produces work that helps you grow your company profit and feeds employee purpose to drive forward. And this is what Dewo does – it removes digital distraction, understanding productivity, and learning how to work smarter. It is sort of an intelligent personal assistant that does more of the work that matters.
The whole tool is driven by the Memory app, which captures everything you do across web and desktop. User privacy and data security is central to all of this. Dewo’s machine learning then uses this data to analyse your productive patterns and make active suggestions to help you work smarter. According to the company, each Dewo user gets their own Deep Work Algorithm, trained using their data alone – meaning Dewo’s outputs are tailored to each user’s specific way of working.
Glue – “Untangle your work”
Other than Dewo, according to the company’s website, it is worth mentioning that the company is also working on other software named – Glue – an automatic knowledge hub. Glue connects scattered files, reveals relationships between work, and surfaces the most relevant information for any given moment. It does that by looking at the apps, services and people you work with and defines the relationships between them. And, it also stores everything you work on, remembers the context in which it was made, and connects it with other information, people and tags.
Capital utilisation
As the world shifts towards remote and hybrid work models amid the pandemic, Memory believes this is a huge opportunity for them to grow in the market. Hence, the raised capital will help Memory to accelerate Timely’s expansion internationally within the time tracking and virtual work management market.
Additionally, the funds will also support the development and launch of Memory’s “deep work” tool, Dewo, which uses AI to help teams create more time for focused, distraction-free work.
Currently headquartered in Oslo with a second office in Pune, India, Memory employs 46 people from 16 different countries with a physical presence in 18 countries. With this fundraise, it is also looking to increase its headcount in different fields such as sales, marketing, product and development. You can apply here.