Dust raises $40 million to conquer the U.S. AI market

The French startup Dust, specializing in artificial intelligence, has just raised $40 million to intensify its development in the United States. This funding round was supported by American funds Sequoia and Abstract, as well as companies Snowflake and Datadog. With this operation, the total funds raised by Dust since its inception now exceed $60 million.

Founded in 2022 by Gabriel Hubert and Stanislas Polu, both former Stripe employees, Dust develops a platform that allows companies to create their own AI agents. These agents are designed to connect to the internal tools of companies, such as Slack, Notion, Gmail, HubSpot, or Google Drive. The goal is to facilitate the automation of daily tasks, improve information retrieval, and enable content generation and analysis from available data.

Unlike other players in the sector that focus on individual AI assistants, Dust aims to develop agents capable of functioning at the scale of an entire organization. These agents share the same data and workflows, allowing for effective collaboration between teams and AI agents. "Complex tasks in business rarely involve just one person. We want to enable teams and AI agents to collaborate from the same context and tools," explains Gabriel Hubert, co-founder of Dust.

Rapid Growth but Not Yet Profitable

Currently, Dust claims to have over 3,000 client companies, ranging from startups to large corporations. In France, it collaborates with companies such as Doctolib, Qonto, Alan, and Pennylane. According to Dust, more than 300,000 AI agents have already been deployed on its platform.

The company has experienced a significant acceleration in its growth over the past two years. According to Sifted, Dust is said to have surpassed $20 million in annual recurring revenue, compared to about $1 million two years ago. However, the company is not yet profitable.

With this new funding round, Dust plans to strengthen its investments in research and development and accelerate its expansion in the United States, a crucial market in the global competition for enterprise AI.