Barndoor Launches Venn.ai to Securely Connect AI Tools to Apps
The company Barndoor has launched Venn.ai, a new standalone product designed to help businesses safely connect AI tools to their internal applications. The platform focuses on access controls and governance, aiming to make it easier for companies to adopt AI technologies securely within their existing workflows.
- Barndoor's co-founder and CEO is Oren Michels, a serial entrepreneur who previously co-founded and led Mashery, an API management company acquired by Intel in 2013. His experience with enterprise software and APIs directly informs Venn.ai's focus on securely connecting different applications. Michels is also an angel investor in successful tech companies like Uber and a Tony-nominated Broadway producer. - The launch of Venn.ai is backed by $13.6 million in seed funding. This initial investment provides the capital for Barndoor to develop and scale the Venn.ai platform to meet the growing demand for secure AI integration in enterprise environments. - Venn.ai is designed to enable "agentic AI" workflows, which is a step beyond the capabilities of generative AI tools like ChatGPT. Agentic AI can autonomously perform complex, multi-step tasks across different applications to achieve a specific goal with limited human supervision. - For a creative professional, an agentic AI workflow managed through Venn.ai could automate aspects of campaign production. For example, a user could instruct an AI to analyze a new collection's key looks, generate a shot list in a project management tool like Asana, cross-reference talent availability in a shared calendar, and then draft outreach emails to agents, all while adhering to predefined access controls. - The platform's core security feature is its "human-in-the-loop" design, which requires user confirmation before the AI takes any action. This is crucial for creative decision-making, as it allows a stylist or creative director to review and approve AI-suggested actions, ensuring that the final output aligns with their creative vision and brand standards. - In the context of editorial styling, Venn.ai could connect a research tool like a private database or a trend-watching platform to a mood board creator and a product inventory system. A stylist could then direct an AI to pull images of all available in-house products that match a specific trend report, and then organize those images on a new mood board for an upcoming shoot, significantly speeding up the initial concepting phase. - Venn.ai's focus on connecting to a wide range of business applications, including Salesforce, Google Workspace, and Slack, means it can be integrated into the existing communication and project management workflows of a fashion house. This avoids the need for creative teams to adopt entirely new, isolated platforms and instead enhances the tools they already use daily.
