Raleigh CEO wants to work with every Fortune 500 firm. And he just raised $100 million.
One day, Igor Jablokov wants to count every Fortune 500 company as a customer. For now, his Raleigh artificial intelligence startup Pryon serves a few dozen of the firms on the venerable list, Jablokov says, with several more “blue chips” on their way.
“Every month, for the remainder of this year, we’re going to have some exciting announcements,” he teased during a phone interview Tuesday afternoon.
The exciting news actually began earlier that day, when Pryon announced it had raised $100 million in a Series B funding round.
Launched in 2017, the startup offers business leaders what Jablokov called “AI-enhanced knowledge management.” Pryon’s virtual platform pulls information from an array of sources, both internal and external, to a business network, to provide attributed answers to corporate inquiries.
Consider a company that wants to know how its West Coast division performed relative to the rest of its business last quarter. Finding this answer might take an employee minutes or even hours, a lapse Jablokov called “friction.” The Pryon platform, he said, can generate a response in seconds.
“And then (it is) always showing you the actual artifact where Pryon learned that fact,” he added.
Users can interact with the platform through a chatbot, or they can choose a more traditional “search-style interface.”
If some of this sounds like Amazon Alexa for business leaders, that makes sense. In 2011, Jablokov sold his previous startup, Yap, to Amazon, and the e-commerce giant went on to use Yap’s technology to develop its widespread voice assistant.
After selling Yap, Jablokov moved from Charlotte to the Triangle to serve as an entrepreneur-in-residence at UNC-Chapel Hill. In early 2021, four years after Pryon formed, the company launched its first virtual assistant platform.
“We’ve never pivoted,” Jablokov said. “People use us because they need an element of truth and trustworthy computing.”
Today, the company has 100 employees, including five who are based in the North Carolina Triangle.
Leading the latest funding round was billionaire entrepreneur and former film producer Thomas Tull (“Godzilla,” “42,” “Inception”), whose US Innovative Technology Fund invested around $80 million. Smaller investors from previous funding rounds include the Triangle Tweener Fund, which maintains a portfolio of local early-stage tech startups.
With its Series B closed, Pryon is now valued at more than $500 million.
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