(Bloomberg) -- Sequoia Capital is leading a $16 million investment in Dust, a French startup building customized AI bots for companies.  

Dust is one of several newcomers selling services to make it easier for enterprises to tap large-language models like OpenAI’s GPT or Google’s Gemini. The company, which announced its financing round on Thursday, said clients use its digital assistants to improve customer service replies, manage sales data and parse libraries of code. Rather than build artificial intelligence models, Dust makes software that plugs into offerings from OpenAI, Alphabet Inc.’s Google, Anthropic and Mistral AI and then links up to apps like Slack. 

Stanislas Polu — Dust’s co-founder and a former research engineer at OpenAI — said that he saw the potential to build applications for generative artificial intelligence even before ChatGPT’s release in 2022. Dust, founded less than two years ago, will capitalize on businesses’ need to find the best way to get value from the tech, he said. The fresh funds will help the company expand into the US and achieve its “global ambition,” he said.

“Within companies, we are still in a pre-ChatGPT world,” said Polu. “The usage compared to the potential is completely ridiculous.” 

Dust said more than 5,000 people actively use its products and it reached $1 million in annual recurring revenue this month. While much of its sales are from fellow startups in France, such as Qonto and health-tech company Alan, customers also include Watershed, the US carbon accounting business. Watershed co-founder Avi Itskovich said Dust’s assistants are most useful for employees who aren’t engineers, allowing them to develop complex data projects without coding.

The Paris-based company is in a crowded market for tools that automate business tasks, which includes Microsoft Corp.’s GitHub and a bevy of startups that design AI software for engineers. While Polu said he also expects the big AI model providers will increasingly compete with his startup, Dust’s nimbleness will give it an advantage.

The startup’s financing is part of a wave of overseas venture capital into AI in France. Mistral, which is also based in Paris, recently closed a round at a €5.8 billion ($6.2 billion) valuation. 

“It’s a great way to push ourselves as French people, that are generally conservative, toward being more aggressive,” he added. 

Sequoia also invested in Dust’s initial financing round of $5.5 million last July. Polu, who also previously worked at Stripe Inc. along with his Dust co-founder Gabriel Hubert, declined to provide his company’s new valuation.

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