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And even the people who invent AI don’t always know what it’s good at besides writing emails. But there are seed-stage companies, like Y Combinator grad and 2024 participant Disrupt Battlefield right now, that are doing something very useful with AI.
Nowadays LLM uses AI to automatically plan large and expensive events. Using its own database of 400,000 global venues and a proprietary model based on a combination of OpenAI, Anthropic, and its own coding, it currently emails venues, caterers and the like to collect bids. Phone calls will even be made to encourage a response to unanswered emails. It then organizes the information and presents it to the event planner, who can make decisions and sign contracts.
The company was founded in 2023 by sisters Anna Sun, CEO, and Amy Yan, COO, and has since been used to book more than $4 million worth of events, including for tech companies like Google, Amazon, Notion and Supabase, Sun tells TechCrunch. .
The idea came after Sun graduated from MIT. Her older sister, Jan, was working at Google several years after graduating from Johns Hopkins. Eight years apart, they both served as presidents of their universities, and each organized many major events.
Sun remembers spending hours “calling ice cream trucks to get quotes” or the time she personally had to buy 2,000 McDonald’s bars from McDonald’s because there was no way to arrange a bulk delivery, and she wished there was an easier way.
Sun knew she wanted to found a startup to address this problem, and once the startup was accepted into YC in the summer of 2023, she convinced her sister to leave her job at Google to help her.
“We got the acceptance letter the day before I graduated, and within that day, Amy gave Google two weeks’ notice,” she recalls.
Currently, they target events with budgets over $20,000 and their fees depend on the budget, charging 5% of their sources. Alternatively, event organizers can sign up for an annual subscription. Although it is most often used for corporate events, it has been used to plan a wedding and 50th anniversary, Sun said.
Anyone interested in using Present Time begins by filling out an entry form to describe the event, location, budget, and any specific needs.
“Some people say, ‘Oh, I want meeting spaces with high ceilings, because we have tall team members.’ So it can be very creative,” she describes.
Since its launch, Nowadays has spread mainly by word of mouth through its early users, who are mostly corporate event planners. Someone introduced Nowadays to a venture capitalist, who immediately invested $300,000. The customer then wrote a check as well, Sun said.
At present, it has just raised a $2 million seed round (i.e. no lead investor) from venture capital firms, including Y Combinator, Basic Set Ventures, Hike VC, VentureUs, Underdog Labs, Decacorn Capital, SBXi, E14, And dozens of other angels.
The startup joins an increasingly crowded field. For example, well-known companies like Cvent and Eventbrite are adding AI tools to their offerings. Partiful, a New York-based event planning app, was named Google’s App of the Year.
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