Israeli startup Any.Do has announced this morning a $1 million round led by Genesis Partners, Blumberg Capital and Innovation Endeavors, Eric Schmidt’s investment fund, as well as private investors including Joe Londsdale (founder of Palantir). AnyDo, currently in stealth mode, is developing technology to translate the user’s natural language voice input to the mobile device into actions, using voice recognition and semantic analysis algorithms. Following the round, Eden Shochat, partner in Genesis, and Blumberg Capital’s Bruce Taragin will join AnyDo’s board of directors. In parallel, AnyDo has also managed to attract Elad Gil, head of search and location based services at Twitter and Eric Tseng, head of mobile products and former Google PM to its board of advisers.
According to AnyDo’s co-founder Omer Perchik, the round will be used to continue the product development phase and to expand the team. AnyDo has been recruiting engineers specialized in algorithms and user interface, using ‘Google-style’ puzzles such as this page. The company has shown traction through it’s current Android App, which has
Any.Do was founded in January of 2010 by Omer Perchik, Itai Cahana and Yoni Lindenfeld, all graduates of IDF technology and programmings unit (Mamram/8200). The three are in their twenties, and have been working on the product as part of the ‘Garage Geeks’ incubator in Israel over the past few months. TheMarker points out that AnyDo is facing competition from Siri Assistant, a free app offering similar voice-command services on the iPhone, but according to Mr Linenfeld, AnyDo is capable of understanding subtle differences, such as the ability to purchase a product offline vs. online, pay bills on the mobile, purchase insurance, etc, using voice commands on the mobile.
I'm a former general partner at google ventures, head of Google for Entrepreneurs in Europe and founding head of Campus London, Google's first physical hub for startups.
I'm also the founder of Techbikers, a non-profit bringing together the startup ecosystem on cycling challenges in support of Room to Read. Since inception in 2012 we've built 11 schools and 50 libraries in the developing world.
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