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UPDATED: Nov. 17, 2020 at 3:40 p.m.

Matt Shumer believes people waste too much of their time writing emails.

Shumer, a junior at Syracuse University, launched OthersideAI alongside co-founders Miles Feldstein and Jason Kuperberg. The venture – which recently attracted $2.6 million in funding from big-name investors, including from Madrona Venture Group, an early backer of Amazon – uses artificial intelligence to generate emails for users so that they spend less time in their inboxes.

“If most people are spending this much time on emails, all that time is just not being put to use in a way that’s beneficial,” said Shumer, CEO and co-founder of OthersideAI. “If we can cut that down even by half, we see this doing more good for the world than most other technologies.”

To the user, OthersideAI appears as a simple text box where they can enter a few key words and phrases that summarize how they would like to reply to an email. The program will then generate a response based on what the user wrote.

To actually generate the email, OthersideAI runs the original email and the pieces of the user’s response through several AIs, which analyze, draft and refine the response.

“On the surface level, the best part of it is, it’s the simplest thing you’ll ever use,” Shumer said. “That’s literally it. It’s the simplest, most elegant implementation of what this thing could be. That’s part of the reason people are taking to it so well.”

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Feldstein and Shumer brought Kuperberg, an SU graduate, onto the project after he provided feedback on the venture at a competition through SU’s Blackstone LaunchPad, a program that supports student entrepreneurship.

Kuperberg now works individually with every client the team allows to test the software, helping them learn to use the AI and soliciting feedback to improve it.

“We don’t want our users to just be users who are using a piece of technology,” Kuperberg said. “We want them to really feel a connection to the technology.”

Before Shumer and Feldstein, a sophomore at SU, met Kuperberg, the two worked together on Visos, a company dedicated to creating virtual reality hardware with medical applications.

The pair had success with the venture, receiving letters of intent from several large companies, and the product was near commercialization in the winter of 2019, Feldstein said. But when the coronavirus pandemic struck, demand for their product stalled, and they put the project on hold.

“We realized that medical VR was not exactly a priority anymore for health care systems,” Shumer said. “PPE was much more important.”

At that point, Shumer discovered GPT-2, an open-source text-generating AI. The software’s ability to mimic human writing astounded him, and he immediately went to Feldstein to discuss how they could incorporate it into their business, he said.

The two decided to leverage the AI technology to draft their emails so they could reach out to more people and expand their network, Feldstein said.

“We built it, and it was fantastic. It worked way better than we expected,” Shumer said. “We thought that this might be a far better business than the one we were pursuing.”

While the team expects to roll the product out in full before the end of the year, Kuperberg said the feedback the group has received so far has been positive.

“We really think about the impact that this is having on our users and the value it’s providing beyond when they hit that generate button,” he said. “The real goal here is we want them to spend less time in their inbox and more time out in the world focusing on the things that matter most to them.”

One of the first investments the team received was $415,000 from two investors in Silicon Valley, Shumer said. This allowed the team to improve their product and release it to more users, which increased excitement among investors in return.

Last week, the company announced the completion of a $2.6 million funding round.

Shumer said the company’s rise from an idea to a multi-million dollar venture in the span of a few months has been surprising, but that it’s also reflective of how OthersideAI operates.

“We don’t see it slowing down with this momentum,” he said. “It’s this super exciting rocketship rollercoaster ride we’ve been on.”

CLARIFICATION: In a previous version of this post, the nature of the $415,000 investment OthersideAI received was unclear. The investment is part of the $2.6 million in funding OthersideAI announced earlier this week. 

Published on October 15, 2020 at 10:59 pm

Contact Chris: cjhippen@syr.edu