Uncovered is our exploration of the companies that don’t receive as much media attention or analyst coverage. We believe every company has an interesting story and we want to hear them.
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The hottest technology of 2023
2023 has started with one technology trend at the forefront of everyone’s mind – the power of chatbots and generative AI. OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Bard have demonstrated the power of the coming wave of artificial intelligence and have people thinking about the potential use cases for this technology.
But at the moment, chatbots are pretty ineffective. When you get that pop up in the bottom right corner of your browser, you know you’re chatting to a computer.
Unith, which up until recently was called Crowd Media, is an Australian company trying to improve the chatbot experience. And where they plan to take this technology is pretty wild.
Company history: From Crowd Media to Unith
Founded in 2009 by serial Australian entrepreneur Domenic Carosa, the company was originally called Crowd Mobile. It offered an app that crowd sourced answers to user questions.
In 2015, Crowd Mobile listed on the ASX. In 2019, South African businessman Steven Schapera invested $3.7 million into the company and was appointed Chairman. He presented a 3 year plan to leverage Crowd Media’s database of human-to-human conversations into artificial intelligence capable of engaging in human-to-computer conversations. This 3 year plan was to culminate in commercialisation of the new conversational AI platform by 2022.
In April 2022, Crowd Media announced its first revenue-generating client for its conversational AI platform – South African healthcare company PangeaMed. Together they would offer a telehealth solution to help medical professionals address patient queries.
Later in 2022, Crowd Media announced it had been engaged by one of the Big Five tech companies (Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon – they didn’t announce which one). Crowd Media agreed to supply three digital avatar licences to deliver information and interact with real people, powered entirely by artificial intelligence.
In December 2022, Crowd Media changed its name to Unith and changed its ASX ticker from CM8 to UNT.
Size of the chatbot market
Unsurpringly, this industry is expected to grow rapidly. We are going to be having a lot more conversations with computers in the coming years.
At this stage, the technology is still clunky. And while ChatGPT is a massive leap forward, there is still a lot of work to be done to allow chatbots to have truly human-like conversations.
Unith discusses the 3 pillars of one-on-one conversation:
- Human – Creating human-like digital doubles that can communicate in real-time
- Voice – Creating an audio double that can generate human-like text-to-speech
- Conversation – Understanding user intentions (Natural Language Understanding)
Put those three pillars together and Unith hopes to offer an AI-generated chatbot that customers or employees can chat to. They see a world where lead capture websites, online courses, employee onboarding and support queries can plug into their AI and have Unith’s computer-generated person have a conversation with a real-life person.
Unith hopes that their conversational AI will allow businesses to automate customer service, marketing, sales and education.
Can’t quite get your head around what that will look like? Here’s an example of their chatbot in action
Still a little bit of work to go.
Navigating the Uncanny Valley
There is a concept in robotics and artificial intelligence – the uncanny valley – that Unith is going to have to cross. In a nutshell, the uncanny valley suggests that humans are completely comfortable with a robot as long as it doesn’t look human. However, as it begins to look more human-like, humans get more uneasy. Then, once it has crossed the uncanny valley, humans are comfortable with something that looks fully human.
Watching this demonstration video of the Unith artificial intelligence, you see how they are traversing the uncanny valley. Their AI is looking more human
Capitalising on the ChatGPT hype
With the focus on ChatGPT, plenty of companies have been looking for ways to capitalise. Unith has announced a $4.5 million capital raise and has told investors they plan to spend that money to integrate ChatGPT into their Talking Head platform.
At the same time, Domenic Carosa has been tweeting about the company’s integration with ChatGPT.
The numbers that matter
At this stage, it is almost too early to see whether their product will gain market share in an increasingly crowded market for chatbots and generative AI. The biggest question that looms over all of their technology is whether Alphabet or Microsoft have something ready to go that is better and can be offered to businesses for less.
As the company transitions its business model, the revenue has fallen massively. That is a watch out, but to be expected as it discontinues other businesses to focus on its AI-powered conversational chatbot.
Ultimately, what matters is cash. How much does it have on its balance sheet (i.e. in its bank account) and how much is it spending every year.
Looking at the last full financial year, FY22, the company started the year with $3.14 million in the bank and ended the year with $2.23 million. At that run rate (burning $910k per year), the company has another two and a bit years before it would run out of money.
However, with Unith capitalising on the ChatGPT hype and raising an additional $4.5 million it has extended that runway. If it continues to burn cash at the same rate it did in FY22, this additional capital will extend its run rate for another 5 years.
Now the only question is, can they develop a commercially viable AI-powered chatbot faster than Microsoft, Google and the scores of other technology companies now focused on generative AI use cases?
That is going to be a pretty big question to answer.