Ex-Twilio VP launches Zocks, an AI that pulls structured data from free-flowing conversations

Today, Zocks, a startup looking to make working with complex information easier, emerged from stealth with $5.5 million in seed funding from Light Speed Venture Partners.

Founded by ex-Twilio VP Mark Gilbert, the company has developed an AI assistant that uses the power of language models to pull structured data out from free-flowing conversations. The company says it is already helping hundreds of enterprises save time that used to go towards manually extracting relevant information.

Zocks is currently focused on the financial services sector, but its technology can easily be expanded to help professionals in the legal and healthcare fields too.

“If you think of applying this to financial services, legal and medical alone, which all have staffing shortages, the productivity impact and ability for these firms to scale is huge. I think it’s one of the largest impacts on professional productivity that AI will have over the next few years,” Gilbert told VentureBeat.

No matter what the sector is, client meetings are critical to successful business operations. However, when it comes to extracting relevant information from these conversations, teams either have to rely on general transcribers like Otter AI or an assistant who goes through the recordings and takes down notes manually.

“A financial planner following up from a client meeting (capturing and inputting the information into notes and then entering into systems, etc) typically takes 40 minutes or over an hour. An Otter-type system gets this down to 30-35 minutes because all of the data is there but they have to look through transcripts and recordings to pull out specific numbers and facts,” Gilbert said. This keeps teams from doing more in their roles, affecting their productivity.

In his role at Twilio, Gilbert saw this gap and decided to address it by founding Zocks with Ákos Ratku, his colleague from Hearsay Systems. The goal was to create an intelligent communication system that could get key data from normal conversations.

“We looked at several industries as use cases, but ultimately focused on financial services first because of our experience building for that industry, and the excitement users had when we talked with them about it,” Gilbert noted.

At the core, Zocks is pretty straightforward to use. The platform integrates with meeting platforms — like Zoom or Teams — or runs standalone for in-person meetings and listens for important information throughout the interaction, the same way a financial professional would.

Then, once the conversation ends, it produces a structured summary with all industry-relevant data points – like financial investments and goals – as well as a follow-up email. The professional can then use the information or put it into their CRM or financial planning systems with a few clicks. 

The whole process takes less than 10 minutes, according to the company.

“On the backend, the system uses LLMs and looks for key information that it uses to build the equivalent of a set of fact tables from each conversation, based on what that professional cares about. The data in these tables can then be transformed and structured to align with their workflows after the meeting, so the advisor gets the data they need, compliance gets the information they need, and the client gets their follow-up more quickly,” Gilbert explained.

The company says the data platform sitting underneath Zocks is HIPAA compliant and equipped with controls that allow the user to decide what data is stored and what isn’t, where it is stored and for how long. There are also REST APIs available to access the data, so companies can integrate it into their internal systems.

Over 150 teams are using Zocks

While the company has just come out of stealth and is targeting one sector, Gilbert says it has already seen significant traction with more than 150 companies, including Winged Wealth Management, Lifepoint Planning and Legacy Financial Advisors, joining its early adopter program.

“Multiple customers have told us that they used to spend 2 hours or more a day on capturing notes and this is now done in a few minutes,” he said. As an add-on benefit, the structured data stemming from Zocks also helps teams perform analysis across clients much more easily (which is nearly impossible with something like summarized meeting notes).

Now, with the backing of Lightspeed, the company plans to build on its work and further improve how teams capture complex data points from meetings in real time.

It plans to launch turnkey integrations with more backend systems, simplify follow-ups for advisors and generate insights across meetings so they can see opportunities to help clients more and where some clients may be at risk.

Originally appeared on: TheSpuzz