Enterprise artificial intelligence company Xembly told users that it’s discontinuing its “customer-facing services,” which included an AI assistant that automatically handled tasks such as meeting notes, scheduling, and action items.
In a message received by Xembly users on Thursday, May 30, the company said, “recent changes in underlying AI platforms have made it difficult for us to continue operating; after much consideration, we are making the tough decision to wind-up Xembly operations and cease our customer-facing services.”
The message said the company was discontinuing its enterprise AI service as of Saturday, June 1, “and winding up Xembly as a business in the coming months.”
However, the message added, “Our team is excited to work on a new chapter and push the boundaries of AI. We will reach back out when we have more to share.”
Founded in 2020, the Seattle-based company has been working in the field of AI assistants since long before the current generative AI boom. The subsequent release of OpenAI’s GPT-4 and other large language models has led to a wave of AI productivity assistants.
The enterprise AI company raised a total of $20 million from investors including Norwest Venture Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Ascend, Seven Peaks Ventures, and Flex Capital, in addition to angel investors. Its most recent funding round totaled $15 million in October 2022.
Customers included Salesforce, Qualtrics, and Twilio, among others. Xembly’s message to users last week said it “has supported thousands of companies saving teams hundreds of thousands of hours of valuable work time.”
Xembly is led by co-founder and CEO Pete Christothoulou, a business and technology industry veteran who is the former CEO of Marchex, the publicly traded call and conversational analytics company.
Reached via phone Friday evening, Christothoulou said the company is still operational. Further details about the “new chapter,” as referenced in Xembly’s message to users, were not available.
Xembly spun out of Madrona Venture Labs in Seattle. In addition to Christothoulou, other founders included CTO Jason Flaks, a Microsoft and Marchex veteran; and Chief Growth Officer Peter Francis, former global growth leader at Qualtrics.
The company employed 45 people as of August 2023.
Xena, the company’s AI assistant, was able to schedule meetings, take notes during meetings, then track and remind users about action items. Xembly described the approach as an AI “Chief of Staff” or executive assistant.
“An effective enterprise productivity platform should not be a tool that operates alongside your work,” Xembly said in a March 13 post, differentiating itself from Microsoft and others. “It should be a tool that works with you and does tasks for you. Enterprise productivity platforms are not co-pilots but autopilots.”
One Xembly user, David Witkowski, CEO of Oku Solutions, wrote on LinkedIn that he was disappointed with the discontinuation of the Xembly service, after he previously experienced the shutdown of the X.ai assistant.
Xembly “did an amazing job recognizing voices and creating action item summaries. It wasn’t really a personal assistant, but I came to rely on it. Xembly is more accurate than AI summary bots from Zoom, etc.,” he wrote.
The message received by Xembly users May 30 said they could save their data by downloading videos, or preserving summaries that they wished to keep by sharing them to their email, Google Docs, or other destination by the end of the following day, May 31. After that, they would be unable to access Xembly through the web, Chrome extension or Slack app, the message explained.
A separate message from Xembly to administrators at the company’s corporate customers also referenced the company’s work on a “new chapter,” but did not mention the plan to wind up Xembly as a business.
