Business Forum • 22 July, 2024 at 8:11 PM
Early Game Ventures (EGV) invests €1 million in CogniSync, a pure-AI startup created by a Romanian team of founders. CogniSync is developing a new tool for optimizing workflows as companies and teams scale by surfacing internal best practices and revealing any potential misalignment with compliance or legal standards while leveraging data owned exclusively and securely by the enterprises where it is deployed.
This new investment is the second one EGV has signed as part of its newly launched Early Game Fund II and keeps once again its credo to #leadearly and invest as early as possible in very promising startups with a disruptive mentality.
Based on its AI-core technology, CogniSync offers expert operational, compliance or legal advice delivered seamlessly when and where you need it, a value proposition that proves to be pure gold in terms of saving time and resources, as well as raising the bar for execution.
Imagine yourself writing an email or an Office/Workspace document with an AI that is there to protect you from making a mistake and assist you. This AI will not correct your grammar, instead, it will reveal any potential misalignment with internal best practices, compliance or legal standards and provide links to relevant documentation - the ultimate source of truth.
Here is a concrete example: let's say you email a founder promising to invest $8 million into her startup. At that moment, CogniSync will flag "$8 million" and suggest "4 million" instead, telling you that, according to your mandate, you may only invest up to $4 million and providing a link to the relevant clause in your mandate that stipulates the upper limit of the investments you are allowed to make.
CogniSync's twofold promise is super-strong: source-backed accuracy of the suggestions or corrections and simplicity of delivery/perfect integration into your workflow.
The convincing value-prop of CogniSync, doubled by the experience of its founders, multiplied by Early Game's capital and support: that's an equation promising impressive returns.
“At Early Game, we don't think of AI as an industry or a vertical, but rather as a horizontal: a technology that traverses all industries and opens a new world of possibilities for incumbents and newcomers. From this perspective, all startups today are AI startups,” says Cristian Munteanu, Managing Partner EGV.
When evaluating startups for investment, EGV team include them in four categories:
- Companies that use AI in the backstage to optimize their processes (for example, developers use Copilot to write code faster and better). Quite often, these companies' products or services are old-school and without any AI-powered features.
- Companies that use AI (usually off-the-shelf AI solutions) to improve their legacy products or services. This is the case for most companies active in the market today as they make an effort to update their tech stack, stay relevant, and protect their market share.
- Truly innovative companies that create AI-centric products and services to address problems that were impossible to solve without AI until today. Starting at this point, companies become appealing to investors such as us at Early Game.
- Lastly, companies that are building AI-centric products and services to address problems that are not yet manifest in the market—maybe even problems created by AI itself.
“When we started our discussions with the brilliant founders of CogniSync, it became evident that we were evaluating an investment into a daring company with a pure AI play,” stated Dan Călugăreanu, Partner EGV. “What we liked most was that the AI integrated in CogniSync's product is always on, always ready to assist the user in a way that is perfectly integrated into the user's habits. We fell in love with this AI delivered beautifully for a great user experience.”
Luca Mateescu, co-founder and CEO of CogniSync stated: "Having managed large teams in fast-scaling enterprises, I understand that internal alignment and continuous learning is paramount for all enterprises as they scale – CogniSync aims to automate this process".
Alex Vesa, co-founder and CTO added: “Our visionary AI system goes beyond existing RAG solutions, focusing not only on unifying huge amounts of fragmented data, but also on ensuring state-of-the-art user relevancy and noise reduction as it delivers real-time, up-to-date access to all key information, aiming to facilitate customer success and ROI+”.
Overall, EGV pre-seed investment in CogniSync confirms its VC thesis and its angle to providing capital to promising startups irrespective of their development stage or financial needs. Early Game is the right VC fund for brave startups seeking a lead investor ready to take risks.
Early Game Ventures (EGV) II is a venture capital fund capitalized by the Recovery Equity Fund, managed by the European Investment Fund, and financed by the PNRR within the Next Generation EU.