Catch raises $5 million Seed to put AI agents to work on executive drudgery
The Israeli startup is targeting executives who want AI to handle administrative work without learning new software or constructing complicated workflows.
Israeli startup Catch has emerged from stealth with $5 million in Seed funding to develop an AI assistant that aims to take over one of the least glamorous but most persistent burdens facing business executives: day-to-day administration.
The Tel Aviv-based company, founded by Nir Sabato and Yoav Ramon, said Wednesday that its Seed round was co-led by Entrée Capital and Pitango, with participation from Seedcamp and Factorial Capital.
Catch is targeting a part of the AI market that has received far less attention than coding, research and content generation. Rather than asking executives to build workflows or learn another software interface, the company says its system can observe an executive's activities, learn their preferences and independently carry out routine administrative work, involving the executive only when a decision genuinely requires human judgment.
The company says Catch has already scheduled more than 12,000 meetings, delegated more than 20,000 tasks and handled more than 200,000 emails.
After syncing with an executive, Catch builds a profile of who they work with, how they prefer to meet and how they travel. It can then operate through text, email, Slack or phone without requiring the executive to use a separate interface.
The company gives a simple example of the type of judgment it is designed to make. If an executive books a flight without a hotel, Catch can check rates at the executive's usual hotel and ask whether it should make the reservation. It can also coordinate with meeting participants, arrange travel and handle follow-ups to correspondence.
“Executives don't want to build their own AI agents, and in the admin space, they don’t want to approve every step their assistant makes - they want it done right, in a way they can trust,” Sabato, Catch's co-founder and CEO, said. “Catch works alongside business leaders the way a great human assistant would, but 24/7, with no dip in attention and fully secure.”
Ramon, Catch's co-founder and CTO, said the company's system anonymizes data and uses it to post-train open-source models through supervised and reinforcement learning. Its architecture uses what the company calls “splinter agents,” each restricted to a particular task and given access only to the information required to complete it.
