Dust

Dust is a French artifical intelligence (AI) start-up using large language models (LLMs) on internal company data to improve productivity by removing silos, making knowledge more accessible, and providing tools to build custom internal apps. The Dust platform is designed to provide a framework for developing and deploying LLM apps without writing execution code. It is specifically designed for the following:

• Working on multiple examples simultaneously while designing an LLM app

• Introspecting model outputs produced by intermediary steps of LLM apps
• Iterating on the design of LLM apps by providing a granular and automated versioning system

Dust's initial primary use case is centralizing and indexing internal data for use by LLMs. The platform supports managed data sources from across internal applications such as Notion, Slack, GitHub, and Google Drive. Dust apps can perform semantic searches over large collections of documents, only retrieving the chunks of information that are the most relevant to the app's task.

The company was founded in September 2022 by Gabriel Hubert and Stanislas Polu. The two founders had previously started a company called Totems that was acquired by Stripe in 2015, making them among the first 150 employees at the company. Polu would go on to join the research engineering team at OpenAI, and Hubert led product at the French health company Alan.

On June 27, 2023, Dust announced it had raised $5.5 million (€5 million) in seed funding led by Sequoia Capital with participation from XYZ, GG1, Seedcamp, Connect, Motier Ventures, Tiny Supercomputer, and AI Grant. Several angel investors also participated, such as Olivier Pomel from Datadog, Julien Codorniou, Julien Chaumond from Hugging Face, Mathilde Collin from Front, Charles Gorintin and Jean-Charles Samuelian-Werve from Alan, Eléonore Crespo and Romain Niccoli from Pigment, Nicolas Brusson from BlaBlaCar, Howie Liu from Airtable, Matthieu Rouif from PhotoRoom, Igor Babuschkin and Irwan Bello. Hubert and Polu are using the funding to grow their team in their home city of Paris.