Floworks Technologies Inc., a startup with a chatbot designed to make knowledge workers more productive, today disclosed that it has raised $1.5 million in seed funding.

TechCrunch reported that Y Combinator and Sense AI, a fund focused on backing artificial intelligence companies, jointly led the round. Several other institutional investors participated as well. 

Floworks’ flagship product is a chatbot called Flowy that is powered by a generative AI model. It’s accessible through Slack. According to the company, the chatbot allows users to interact with popular software-as-a-service platforms such as Salesforce using natural language commands.

The company is currently said to be focusing mainly on sales automation use cases. It says its Flowy chatbot speeds up repetitive tasks such as entering new deal details into a company’s customer relationship management platform. Salespeople can input deal information into the chatbot with a single prompt instead of having to open their CRM platform’s interface and manually enter data.

According to Floworks, Flowy is also capable of interacting with multiple SaaS applications at once. A user could, for example, write a Slack message that asks the chatbot to change a CRM record and send an email about the change to the relevant colleagues. Flowy can update the record, generate a draft email and display it to the user for review before sending it.

Another task that Floworks promises to ease is data access. In the enterprise, information is often scattered across multiple applications, which means users sometimes have to open several tabs to find the records they’re seeking. Floworks says its chatbot makes it possible to retrieve data from multiple applications through Slack.

The company says it currently generates $250,000 in annual recurring revenue. To grow its top line and installed base, it reportedly plans to onboard channel partners that can help it reach more customers. It also plans to invest in product development. 

Floworks’ chatbot can currently interact with five applications: Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Drive, Salesforce and HubSpot. The company plans to add integrations with several sales automation tools down the road. In the longer term, Floworks intends to expand its focus beyond sales to additional use cases such as business intelligence.

A number of other companies are also leveraging generative AI to let workers interact with SaaS applications using natural language commands. One of those companies is OpenAI LP, which enables users to connect its ChatGPT chatbot to third-party applications with plugins. Each plugin turns ChatGPT into a natural language interface for the SaaS application with which it integrates.

Image: Floworks