Yaar cofounders Sobi Walia (left), Karan Walia (center) and Anton Mamonov (right) announced the ... [+]
Toronto-based entrepreneur Karan Walia vividly remembers the first time he watched “The Mother Of All Demos,” a 1968 video of early computer engineer Douglas Engelbart famously introducing the world to computing tools like the mouse, hyperlinks and video conferencing. Watching from a lecture hall at York University in 2009, Walia was surprised to realize just how much hadn’t changed.
In fact, 41 years later, he was still interacting with computers just like Engelbart had, with a mouse, windows and lots of clicking and scrolling. The realization sparked a question for Walia: What if humans could interact with computers the way they do with each other? After 13 years, he thinks he has an answer.
On Thursday, the 32-year-old entrepreneur announced the launch of his latest venture, an AI-powered smart chat app called Yaar, alongside cofounders Anton Mamonov and Sobi Walia, Karan’s younger brother. The trio, who appeared on the Forbes 2020 Under 30 Marketing & Advertising list, secured $20 million in funding from investors including Praveen Arichandran, a tech entrepreneur and 2019 Forbes Under 30 lister, and La Mar Taylor, a 2017 Under 30 lister who earned a spot for his work as The Weeknd’s creative director.
“Our goal is to teach computers how to chat and browse the internet like humans,” Walia told Forbes. “We as a society are still communicating with computers using an interface and language that is easy for computers to understand, and not us.”
Walia declined to share Yaar’s valuation or projected revenue. He also declined to specify how much equity he and his founders hold in the company, though he said he holds the most. Yaar is the latest endeavor for Walia and his cofounders, who first teamed up to build the ad-tech firm Cluep in 2012. The company, which led advertising campaigns for brands like Starbucks, Amazon and McDonald’s, was bought by marketing agency Impact Group for $40 million in 2018.
Yaar can send emails, search the internet and order food, among other activities, based on messages ... [+]
Walia’s new app, primarily aimed at employees who work in sales or operations fields, compiles users’ messages from different platforms (like email, Slack and LinkedIn) into one place—the Yaar app—and then offers users the option of taking action based on what’s written. If in an email, for example, a colleague suggests scheduling a meeting, Yaar users can employ Walia’s patent-pending AI model called Webagent to search the user’s calendar and automatically generate a reply email with a meeting invitation. The model can also order food, summon a rideshare and search the internet, among other activities.
Walia says his model stands alone among AI software because it can turn written language into digital actions like clicking, scrolling and typing. Yaar’s beta testers—a group of 50 sales and operations workers across multiple companies—have saved an average of six hours and seven minutes a month thus far using Yaar’s automation capabilities, he claims. He calls it “the Tesla autopilot of the internet.”
While Walia insists his model is unmatched by other AI software–despite the existence of popular AI assistant tools like Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa–experts say he enters an increasingly crowded field rife with competitors. Companies like [24]7.ai, Amelia, ServiceNow and Salesforce’s Einstein all use artificial intelligence to automate routine tasks in the workplace.
However, the biggest obstacle in the way of Yaar’s success may be its own potential customers, says Will McKeon-White, who researches chatbots and conversational AI as an analyst at Forrester Research. He says the app’s user-friendliness will weigh heavily on its impact.
“Usually the biggest hurdle that those face is ultimately being useful to the end user and making a real difference in how they do their daily work,” McKeon-White says. “Chat solutions are very hard. They’re hard to get right, and people are not forgiving.”
Walia agrees that prior productivity tools haven’t always succeeded in their mission of saving people time, a failure he attributed to a cumbersome user experience. “What’s the point of these task management tools if making my task becomes a task?” he quipped.
But he said he wouldn’t call Yaar a productivity tool. He likes to think of it as a companion.
“What if getting computers to do things was as simple as talking to a friend and telling them what to do?” he said. “After all, natural language has been our universal interface.”
This post was updated to reflect that, after this article was published, according to Karan Walia, the Yaar shares that originally belonged to the Toronto-based creative incubator Hxouse were transferred directly to La Mar Taylor, Hxouse’s cofounder and the creative director for The Weeknd.
