2022 Year In Review

Initium's Summary of 2022

Summarizing information is … hard – we know because we are experiencing this first hand :) . And it's especially difficult to summarize an entire year, but here we go.

TL;DR

2022 was a full year for us at Initium.AI – a year of building, learning, and fulfilling interactions. What have we been up to? First and foremost, we made strides on developing our main product – a platform to assist people with their virtual meetings, through meeting summarization, transcript search, key topics, and conversation analytics. We have also worked with amazing people, and had the opportunity to mentor several interns. We made new partnerships and expanded existing ones. We made progress on identifying funding. And we expanded our outreach, on our website and also on social media.

Initium Platform

Most of our effort in 2022 went into developing the Initium platform. Our goal is to assist people with their virtual meetings, which have become the dominant mode of interaction, especially during the Covid pandemic. Recognizing that meetings can take a lot of our time, we provide assistance with note taking and meeting content access, as well as analytics that provide insights and can help improve future meetings. Our initial focus is on sales meetings, as sales agents are particularly overwhelmed by the number of meetings they have to hold on a daily basis – sometimes as many as 50 calls in a day.

What do we do? For each meeting that goes through our platform, either uploaded directly as an audio file or as a transcript, or through the integration with Zoom:

• we produce a summary that can serve as an overview (notes) for the meeting
• we provide the ability to search the transcript, to facilitate the easy recollection of points in the conversation
• we identify the action items resulting from the meeting
• we identify the key topics of the conversation, which can serve as "tags" to quickly determine what was discussed
• we measure various analytics, such as talk time for each meeting participant, overall sentiment, conversation empathy, and more, to provide insights that can be leveraged to improve future meetings

As they say, a picture is worth a thousand words, so to illustrate our platform in action, consider the example of a 6 minute conversation between a sales agent and a customer, discussing interest in medical equipment. Our platform will give a "meeting at a glance" view, with a brief overview of the meeting content and meeting analytics.

How do we do it? We leverage some of the most recent advances in neural sequence-to-sequence and information extraction models, alongside datasets that allow us to learn the characteristics of virtual conversations. Both company founders are passionate about Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence, and constantly keep abreast of the most recent findings in these fields, which helps us identify the ideal solutions for our product.

We will alpha-launch soon, so if you are interested in learning more and/or trying our platform, please reach out!

Team

We have been fortunate to work with fantastic employees and interns over the past year, who worked with us on backend and frontend development, and also helped us with new NLP and ML capability development. Our goal is to cultivate a culture of mutual respect and trust, where people from different backgrounds can flourish and achieve their best. In addition to the experience of working in a startup environment, which we try to share with the entire team by cultivating transparency of processes and decisions, we also strive to provide mentorship to everyone on the team, and especially to the interns who are at the early stages of their careers.

Partners

We are grateful to have close collaborations with amazing companies that make a difference through what they do. Our closest partners during 2022 included companies that are users or producers of advanced AI technology, including MedEquip Depot, Evva360, Coligomed, Michigan Radio, and more. We are big believers in the power of collaboration, and always open to new partnerships – please reach out if you believe we could work together.

Funding

Initium has been so far funded through $500,000 in research and development grants, with the generous support of the National Science Foundation (in funders talk, this would be considered "angel investment" – but the kind that does not take any shares). In 2022, we invested effort to apply for other research and development funding. We have also received in-kind financial support from Google, Notion, and Hubspot through their startup programs.

Outreach

We are passionate about Natural Language Processing and Artificial Intelligence, and developing technologies that can assist us with the growing number of virtual meetings. To share our passion and knowledge with others, throughout 2022, we built a more active presence on our website and on LinkedIn, where we share information about the company and our product, and more generally information of relevance to #AI for virtual meetings – including the latest in academic research, industry advances, and more. If you want to connect with us, you can find us here on our website, or on LinkedIn.