when Re-spelling When founder Matthew Rastovak was in high school, he did an internship where his job was to copy information from a government website into a spreadsheet. It was a mind-numbing feat, so being an enterprising young man, he wrote some code to automate the task. These days, his company helps non-technical employees harness the power of generative AI to create workflows to automate tasks.
Today, the company announced a $4.75 million seed round led by Craft Ventures with the help of a slew of notable industry angels.
“Respell uses AI automation to help build workflows. “It’s a pretty overused term at this point, but I think we’ve approached it a little differently, where we’re very focused on non-technical people,” Rastovak told TechCrunch.
This is because he sees a market in which there are too many tools made by engineers for engineers. He wanted to change that with Respell, using the power of generative AI to help less technical users build workflows very quickly by simply describing what they want to do and letting the software do the rest.
Until now, the way non-technical people have built workflows is using a drag-and-drop approach to a palette. The software may come with predefined workflow components, but it still involves the manual task of defining the workflow. Respell is changing that by giving people the ability to describe it, then building a workflow for them and letting them modify it as needed.
![Reply interface](https://techcrunch.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/image-1.png)
Image credits: Re-spelling
The company calls its workflow “spells” and users can build them or use previously created ones. When it comes to the underlying LLM, the company tries to be agnostic and work with all the big names out there, but the most performing model right now is GPT-4 and so most of the platform works with that at the moment, he says.
Rastovac has seized the opportunity to leverage generative AI to solve the problem of workflow tools in a new way, says Craft Ventures investor Sean Whitney. “While recent advances in AI represent enormous transformative potential, there is one big problem: it is difficult for the vast majority of people to tap into this potential,” he said in a statement. “Respell makes it easy for anyone to use powerful AI.” In customizable and personal ways.
The company launched last year, and came out with the first version in March. It became generally available in August. Today, he has eight full-time employees and plans to hire two more. He says he wants to be cautious and let his financial performance drive his hiring, rather than just hiring for growth.