SXSW Startups: Hendrix.ai
The Forrest Four-Cast: February 14, 2019
Fifty diverse startups will aim to impress a panel of judges and a live audience with their skills, creativity and innovation at SXSW Pitch Presented by Cyndx. Winners in 10 categories will be announced at the Pitch Award Ceremony at 6:30 pm Sunday, March 10, at the Hilton Austin.
A finalist in Artificial Intelligence, which pitches at 11 am Sunday, March 10, Testfire Labs is an award-winning software company that uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to build next-generation productivity tools. The demands on companies and employees to be more, do more, and know more continue to grow. There are so many new applications and enhancements that it’s hard to know if we’re getting better at our work or better at managing new tools. The vision for Testfire Labs is to build solutions to reduce distraction and make the capture and recall of data as natural as having a conversation. The best technology will be the technology we don’t have to install, learn, or update.
Their flagship product is Hendrix.ai, an AI-assistant that transcribes notes and action items, audits meeting history, and drops it all into a searchable dashboard, for unprecedented organization and productivity insights.
Hendrix.ai founder and CEO Dave Damer (pictured above), offered some thoughts on his company’s plans.
What is your competitive advantage?
Not surprisingly, what gets talked about in meetings is often considered pretty sensitive and highly confidential. We built Hendrix.ai to handle the most stringent of security requirements to satisfy the CIOs of enterprise companies. Now we’re doing all the audits and compliance work to back that claim up.
What are your goals for Hendrix.ai in 2019?
Advancements in conversational agents and natural language processing since we founded Testfire Labs almost two years ago have been extensive. This year is the year that Hendrix.ai breaks out. Traction is starting to ramp up and companies are finding new use cases for the technology every week. Our goal for Hendrix is to get 100,000 daily active users on the system before 2020.
How does Hendrix.ai work together with mainstream conference platforms?
Today, Hendrix connects to most major conferencing providers just like any other participant. By sharing your calendar, inviting Hendrix by email or calling him by phone, Hendrix will join and start monitoring the conversation. Hendrix listens to the the providers prompts and responds with participant information within the meeting invite. We are developing new ways for Hendrix to join, embedded into popular conferencing platforms, mobile OS, and collaboration systems like Slack and Teams.
You were featured as one of three companies approved to provide AI products and services to the Government of Canada. What are some primary ways you envision AI driving efficiency in government?
Large organizations all suffer from the challenge of coordination of efforts and making effective use of resources. Government itself has the additional challenge of regular changes in leadership and strategic direction. Capturing data from meetings across the organization builds institutional memory that can help people avoid duplicate work, identify bottlenecks, and find ways to collaborate. AI is making it easier to record and recover information faster and easier and information is power, not information overload.
What are you most looking forward to at SXSW?
It’s exciting to be part of such a diverse festival of music, film, comedy, gaming, and technology. Getting to put Testfire Labs and our product Hendrix.ai out there at SXSW is huge for us and we’re honored to have been selected as a finalist.
Testfire Labs is currently based in Edmonton, Canada. Tell us about the startup ecosystem there.
Edmonton has earned a global reputation for advances in AI research. Our universities and colleges are developing great technical and design talent. We have a very supportive government infrastructure with lots of access to grants and community support, but we still struggle in terms of access to capital for technology companies. When you compare Canadian cities to U.S. cities, you see how, in some cases, we’re producing just as many startups but we’re seeing fractions of the capital opportunities that are in the US. The investment market is fundamentally more conservative in Canada. In Alberta in particular, there is a desire to fund things people understand — real estate, oil and gas, widgets. AI is moving that needle in Canada and we hope to keep the fires lit.
What tech trend is your team most excited about?
The increasing value being placed on the power of AI to enhance our daily lives — especially at work. Canada is very intentional about investing in AI-related research and technology, and we are looking forward to seeing what we are able to build.
What do you enjoy most and least about the startup experience?
Having an idea that naturally rallies people around it can be a thrilling experience, full of all the right energy. People are excited to be part of it and the work doesn’t feel like work. The part that’s the most difficult in a startup is when things aren’t going as planned and there are a lot of difficult decisions to make. Those times almost always happen in a startup so being able to navigate the highs and lows is the experience that all entrepreneurs sign up for.
What has the startup experience taught you about life?
That it can go by pretty fast when you’re heads down in a startup and it’s important to come up for air from time to time. You need to check in with your partner, your kids, your family and friends just to stay connected to the things that are really important. It’s easy to get lost or to feel alone when you’re doing a startup so keeping those connections outside of it is critical, because you’re going to need it.
What advice would you give to others wanting to join the startup journey?
When you imagine getting involved in a startup, it has to be important to you to build something great and solve big problems. People have a lot of ideas for building businesses, but startup implies that you’re setting yourself on a path to build something that scales, that’s global, that disrupts. If you want to build a business, you can take your time, limit risk, develop and grow slowly. If you want to do a startup you have to strap on the rocket pack and get ready for a hell of a ride.
Look for more interviews with other SXSW Pitch finalists in this space between now and March.
Click here to see all 50 finalists for SXSW Pitch 2019, along with the links to their interviews on Medium.
Also, if you are an entrepreneur, check out all the cool panels and presentations in the Entrepreneurship and Startups Track, which runs March 8–12 at SXSW.
Hugh Forrest serves as Chief Programming Officer at SXSW, the world’s most unique gathering of creative professionals. He also tries to write at least four paragraphs per day on Medium. These posts often cover tech-related trends; other times they focus on books, pop culture, sports and other current events.
