Israeli startup eSelf today announced it has secured $4.5 million in seed funding to develop a video-based real-time conversational AI agent platform. Co-founded by Dr. Alan Bekker, a former conversational AI leader at Snap, the company aims to provide innovative AI solutions for sectors such as education, sales, financial services, real estate, and healthcare.
The company claims its AI agents respond to queries in less than 1.7 seconds, faster than other leading companies in the market. eSelf has launched a "no-code" creation studio that allows clients to build AI agents capable of operating common applications like Calendly and Salesforce, achieving functionality similar to that of a human assistant.
Currently, Christie Real Estate and Brazilian bank AGI are among eSelf's clients. This funding round was led by Portuguese firm Explorer Investments, with participation from strategic investors including Ridge Ventures and former YouTube Vice President of Engineering Eyal Manor.
Bekker's entrepreneurial journey is quite remarkable. Originally intending to become a rabbi, he eventually shifted to engineering and computer science, establishing expertise in voice recognition. His first startup, Voca, was acquired by Snap for $100 million, laying the technological foundation for Snapchat's My AI.
Meanwhile, eSelf is in fierce competition in the AI agent space. Companies like H, Eleven Labs, Amazon, and Anthropic are also developing similar AI agent solutions. The difference lies in eSelf's focus on video and voice interactions, rather than traditional text responses.
Co-founder and natural language processing expert Eylon Shoshan served in Israel's renowned Unit 8200. Notably, eSelf has not built a large language model from scratch but has chosen to fine-tune Meta's Llama model, a strategy that may help reduce operational costs.
As an emerging player in the AI agent field, eSelf's success will depend on its technological innovation and market acceptance. In the current rapidly evolving landscape of generative AI, whether the company's solutions can truly revolutionize enterprise-level AI assistants remains to be seen.
