Meet Spool AI, the startup curing ‘corporate amnesia’

Spool AI is the startup co-founded by Leopold Silberstein and Chloe Hanson-Boyd to put an end to ‘corporate amnesia’, using artificial intelligence to better connect employees and communications streams in companies.

Silberstein explained why.

“As [an] organisation grows, it gets exponentially harder and harder to find or to understand what everybody’s doing.

“That leads to duplicated work, it leads to wasted time trying to work things out, and it really shapes and limits what’s possible for organisations, just because, at the end of the day, humans are not capable of understanding everything that’s going on.

“So our idea is really: ‘maybe humans can’t do it, but a computer could,” he said.

Spool AI is one of five early-stage startups shortlisted to compete at the Pitch, SmartCompany‘s early-stage startup competition.

“It comes at a bit of an interesting time in AI development,” added Hanson-Boyd. “It’s a race to think about where value can be created by large language models and I think we came upon Spool because no-one’s really thinking about that issue of tribal knowledge and how you don’t know what you don’t know.”

The journey to Spool AI

Silberstein spent eight years in Silicon Valley, first working at Groupon and then for the final five years at Apple. He’s no stranger to the startup ecosystem and was excited to start his own thing upon returning home.

Hanson-Boyd comes to the startup world as a “corporate refugee”, after 15 years consulting and working at big corporations.

The pair met through the Antler incubator program.

Essentially, Spool AI spans across internal comms platforms and can identify knowledge even from colleagues a user may not have known to include, to find the right answers faster. More than that, Hanson-Boyd is excited about how Spool AI can foster connections between employees as teams become fragmented after lockdowns and in the work-from-home era.

“We’ve got an ever more disconnected workforce and no one really nailed that during COVID,” she said.

“We’ve still got this hangover. How do we really engage employees and empower employees in that ever-digitised world where they are distributed, they are contracted, they are remote or partially remote, and the kind of tribe is no longer? The water cooler conversation doesn’t exist and I’ve never seen it nailed. 

“That’s where we came together and said: ‘this can be fixed’, for one of the first times in history.”

Pitching Spool AI

The pair have some experience pitching within the Antler incubator and also work with an advisor who “knows exactly what our potholes are going to be”, said Hanson-Boyd.

They’ve worked hard to distill it. “The biggest thing has really been trying to find that narrow niche… this tangible little bite-size chunk of the problem that people can really resonate with,” Silberstein said.

“The problem is so big that there is a dimension of it that resonates with almost everybody,” he said. And whether a user cares about compliance, regulation, productivity, or simply about not being overwhelmed by too many different communication channels, they’re confident in getting the message across. There are many different angles of this.”