Inflection AI refocused on empathetic business chatbots after Microsoft took its founders

AI company behind the Pi personal assistant, now building empathetic customer-support and employee-facing bots for other companies.

Emotional intelligence in AI is under-researched and ready to sell: enterprises will pay for customised empathetic chatbots that rivals chasing the mass market ignore.

$1.525B raised in total; Hoffman said it was 'well funded for 18 months' after Microsoft's reported $650M deal.

Inflection built Pi, an emotionally empathetic personal AI assistant, with $1.525B in funding, and in March 2024 co-founder Suleyman and about 70 staff moved to Microsoft in a deal reportedly worth $650M.

Co-founder Reid Hoffman chose not to disband. He recruited Sean White (CEO, previously Mozilla R&D), Vibhu Mittal (CTO), Ted Shelton (COO, from Bain) and Ian McCarthy (product).

In May 2024 Inflection told VentureBeat it would build an AI studio for brands to make their own assistants, offering empathetic support agents, internal employee bots and licensed agent technology. It had about 12 people and was hiring fine-tuning engineers.

Leaders said big model labs were racing to serve the mass market and not focused on customisation, leaving room for brand-specific bots.

Inflection had worked on EQ for two years and held hundreds of thousands of fine-tuning examples of emotional conversation.

After the Microsoft deal, Hoffman believed the company still had real money and a consumer app that kept learning from users.

When your founders and most of your team are acqui-hired away, the surviving company has to pick one differentiator and customer: Inflection chose empathy and enterprise customisation.

As of 20 May 2024, Inflection had about 12 employees, was hiring engineers for fine-tuning and platform work, and said several departed engineers would help maintain core systems during the transition. Competitors such as OpenAI were adding memory and emotion features.