All Posts
Gabriel Hubert’s generative AI startup, Dust, is using LLMs to improve efficiency in the workplace. See our FF Rising Stars for 2023!
Gabriel Hubert’s Dust allows companies to deploy LLM applications in a safe and usable way using internal information and knowledge so their teams can get better work done faster.
Dust raised €5m in a Seed funding round led by Sequoia Capital in June 2023, just four months after starting out. It’s also backed by Olivier Pomel (Datadog), Jean-Charles Samuelian and Charles Gorintin (Alan), and Eleonore Crespo and Romain Nicoli (Pigment).
A serial entrepreneur, Gabriel’s first startup, a data analytics company, was acquired by Stripe in 2014. He went on to work as a product lead at Stripe and Alan before entering the generative AI space and co-founding Dust in February 2023.
Founded: Feb 2023
Country: France
No. of employees: 8
Stage: Seed
Total funding raised: €5m
Investors Include: Sequoia Capital, AIGrant, GG1, Connect Ventures, Motier VC, Remote First, Tiny Supercomputer, Seedcamp, XYZ, Nat Friedman, Olivier Pomel (Datadog), Jean-Charles Samuelian & Charles Gorintin (Alan), Eleonore Crespo & Romain Nicoli (Pigment), Mathilde Collin (Front)
Why did you decide to start Dust?
The companies we’ve worked for – Stripe, Open AI, and Alan – were excellent schools where we witnessed firsthand how work can ‘work better’. Investing heavily in operational excellence and team empowerment (fewer meetings and over-indexing on transparency) helps companies attract and retain the best talent, and that makes for fun and winning teams. That belief led us to want to build the products that can help more companies operate this way.
Software needs to evolve to fight the information chaos that creeps in as teams grow fast. We believe in creating the operating software that lets smart teams get better work done because it’s these teams that over time define the standards that others seek to emulate. LLMs are a disruption that justifies creating a new company to develop a new kind of software – a company built on artificial intelligence, rather than sprinkling it around here and there.
What do you want to achieve?
Our mission is to equip every smart team with software that reshapes how internal information is managed and augments each team member by bending to their will and preferences, not the other way around. R2-D2, not Skynet!
What’s your biggest challenge right now?
As an LLM-native company, we’re early in our journey and the noise that the industry is experiencing is both a blessing and a curse. There are also a number of legitimate questions over how to deploy LLMs safely. That said, we’re focused and determined, so any challenge is a learning opportunity.
What’s the best advice you’ve ever received?
Find what you’re really good at and love doing, and find a place that wants you to do that all the time.
What tech would you not be able to do without?
Caveat: promotion ahead! But, honestly, we’ve all become daily active users of Dust and it seems tough to go back to a company without software that takes on the problem of collaboration within a team that way. If not Dust, then Google Maps. Nothing would work without Google Maps.
Read more about the founders whose ideas have world-changing potential. Check out our FF Rising Stars for 2023.
