Stop me if this sounds familiar to you: you take a day off, and when you return to the office in the morning or open your laptop and connect to Slack, your eyes darken with hundreds of notifications and unread messages. All you want to do is catch up and understand what is relevant to you and what's happening with the projects you're working on. Nir Zohar, President of Wix, together with Itzik Ben-Best, want to solve this problem for you with their new startup.
One command and hundreds of messages become one paragraph
Meet theGist, the new company that came out of stealth today (Tuesday) with its first tool, theGist for Slack, which, if you haven't guessed yet, is designed for Slack. In a live demonstration that the company held for us, I could see how the simple Slackbot connected to the company's systems could present a summary of a certain channel. Within a few seconds, a message appeared that summarizes everything you missed on a certain day and makes the information accessible like a summary of the previous events ("Jim asked Pamela for help in organizing the event and a replacement for Ryan has not yet been found"). According to the company, the system scans hundreds of posts and discussions and creates a personal summary for each user, according to their needs, instead of sifting through dozens and hundreds of irrelevant messages.
"We are coming to solve the problem of there being too much-distributed data in the organization. All of this is spread over many dozens of tools, and we want to be able to present the relevant things in a fast and easy way”, explained Itay Dressler, CTO at theGist. According to him, the company's first product is just a kind of demonstration of the company's general concept. Later, the company plans to launch more tools for other platforms, and Dressler hints that the next target could be Notion and maybe even GitHub. "We do special training for models so that they know how to refer to conversations and communicate in Slack and work on data in Slack which is different from the way they communicate in email or GitHub. But the engines can do the core in the same way."
A $7 million start
"What we are also doing is strengthening a very strong muscle of understanding people, what they are dealing with, what they want to do, and what’s their intention, versus what is actually happening, because one of the biggest gaps in the market today, in all the tools that help you be productive, is a lack of understanding of the context. This is just a teaser of what our muscle can do, but our vision is long-term. We have started working on the next big things. This is just a taste of our vision and what we want to do. We are not just this tool… it is only part of what we want to do… Our vision is more massive than Slack", explains Ofir Abutbul, VP of Product, who was one of the first employees at theGist. Later, the company will make it possible to receive a summary of last night's conversations every morning on every channel, so that you will not have to go through the sea of unread messages every day. At first, I was hesitant about the concept of sending corporate and sometimes sensitive Slack messages directly through Slackbot, but Dressler claims that the company does not keep any information from the analyzed conversations, except for analytical information.
Today (Tuesday) theGist also announces the completion of a Pre-Seed fundraising round amounting to $7 million led by StageOne Ventures and Aleph. The company was founded in 2022 by Itzik Ben Best (CEO) who previously worked at Blizzard and OpenWeb, Nir Zohar (President of Wix) and Itai Dressler (CTO). Today the company employs 10 people in its offices in Tel Aviv and New York. By the way, if you want to try theGist's first product, you can add their Slackbot to your Slack here.
