
Some of Seattle’s most experienced entrepreneurs and technologists have come together to create a new startup called Augment, promising to make the coveted four-day work week a reality for more people. And with $3.45 million of fresh seed funding in its coffers, it is one step closer to doing just that.
Augment is spin-out of Paul Allen’s Ai2 Incubator — a program known for producing several local standouts including Kitt.ai and WellSaid Labs, which raised a $10 million Series A over the summer. The company also boasts an impressive founding team of former leaders at Google, Microsoft, Facebook and Redfin, and is headed by Jordan Ritter, who co-founded audio streaming pioneer Napster.
Details on exactly how Augment’s software works are slim, but Ritter says it is designed to “supercharge” users’ productivity, freeing them from the “minutiae” of daily work tasks.
“The devices and apps we use daily know so much about us, yet they don’t do much with that knowledge, and we’re forced to repeat the same tasks day in and day out,” Ritter said in a recent blog post. To fix this, he and his co-founders Daniel Ladvocat Cintra, Saurav Pahadia and Shu Wu have been “heads down” at the Allen Institute over the last several months, building a product that they “firmly believe might actually make the four-day workweek within reach.”
The concept of a four-day workweek has become increasingly popular amid the pandemic, with concerns about work-life balance, mental health and burnout coming to a head. A growing number of companies have adopted a permanent four-day workweek — most recently tech unicorn Bolt — and the concept is even gaining traction in Congress. In fact, the Congressional Progressive Caucus, the biggest bloc of liberal lawmakers in the legislature, recently endorsed a bill seeking to implement a four-day workweek.
“After a nearly two-year-long pandemic that forced millions of people to explore remote work options, it’s safe to say that we can’t — and shouldn’t — simply go back to normal, because normal wasn’t working. People were spending far more time at work, less time with loved ones, their health and well-being was worsening, and all the while, their pay has remained stagnant,” California Congressman Mark Takano, who proposed the bill, said in a statement, framing the legislation as a way to restore work-life balance. “It’s time for progress,” he added.
Geoff Harris, managing partner at Flying Fish Ventures who co-founded Augment’s seed round with JAZZ Venture Partners, seems to feel the same way, and has been working with the startup over the last several months to bring about that progress.
“We have a shared vision for where artificial intelligence and machine learning can assist us all to be more productive and spend more time on things that matter,” Harris said in a statement provided to Built In, harking back to his time as an executive at Microsoft. “This vision is one that I started on while working on Cortana at Microsoft and am passionate about helping companies that want to see that vision fully realized.”
To that end, Augment says it will use this fresh funding to launch a public beta, as well as grow its engineering and design teams.