Beyond Work raises $2.5M to make work more 'human' with LLMs

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Beyond Work, a London-based start-up, seeks to make working with enterprise tools more human and transparent through large language models. (LLMs), today announced that it has raised $2.5 million in a pre-seed funding round. The investment was led by Moonfire Ventures, with participation from MIT's E14 fund.

Beyond Work said it plans to use the capital to accelerate the development of its artificial intelligence-based work platform. The technology remains secret as Fortune 500 companies continue to test it.

"We are at a pivotal moment with this technology: it has the potential to make work more human, but we will only get there if we build from the ground up, rather than integrating it into existing applications It's time for real change,” said Christian Lanng, company president who is also co-founder and CEO of Tradeshift.

While the specifics of the technology being developed remain under wraps, Lanng's recent blog post and today's press release seem to suggest the company is working to change the way teams interact with their software platforms.

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"In most cases, people don't use the software, it uses it to serve other people's purposes. Click a button here, change a bit of data there...and if you're lucky, it will spark something for someone you don't know or see – and then, maybe, just maybe, you can get on with your real work,” the president wrote.

According to the company, most of these work interfaces, interfaces, apps, and tools are static, with AI appearing only as add-ons to existing software. This, Lanng said, won't last long, and most co-drivers adding more to existing interfaces will feel like "Microsoft Clippy".

The solution to this problem, according to the company, is to make software interaction more human by harnessing the power of language, our most powerful tool for understanding and communicating. This is where LLMs will come in.

"What if we could redesign computing so that language was also the most powerful way to communicate with computers? What if the future of technology reflected the social skills we've been practicing for millennia? This is where LLMs offer real promise. They can replace oversized, sprawling user interfaces with something much simpler and more human. Just tell your computer what you want it to do. Not with a keyboard and a mouse, but in how you interact with everything else in your life,” Lanng said in the blog post.

While he didn't explain exactly how Beyond Work's in-development platform will use LLMs to achieve this (without serving as an add-on), the effort could complement...