Harmony AI Wants to Kill Soul-Crushing Busy Work — and Raised $1.6M in Chattanooga to Do It
Harmony AI, a Chattanooga-based startup, raised $1.6 million to eliminate soul-crushing busy work by automating repetitive digital tasks. Founded by George Munguia, the company helps teams streamline workflows using video-based AI.
George Munguia wants to eliminate soul-crushing jobs.
Specifically, he wants end repetitive digital tasks and ‘busy work’ that causes people to “hate the work they are doing.”
“[Those jobs] are not what humans are meant to do,” he told Hypepotamus. “We're meant to be creative and to do work that we love.”
Munguia’s vision for the future of work led him and his team to launch Harmony AI, an early-stage startup that is now building out of Chattanooga, Tennessee.
Users take a video of their workflow, showing exactly how they complete specific tasks across tools like Slack, Notion, Chrome, Google Sheets, and Airtable. Harmony’s AI then parses through that video and lays out on a technical level exactly what each part of a task requires.
Building For The Future of Work
The founders of the four-month-old company met through OnDeck, a startup fellowship community in San Francisco. Even before they had a product, the team talked to early potential customers about their idea around automating workflows.
“I pre sold the product that we didn't have,” he said, adding that they started building in real-time as customers were joining. Investors took note, given that Harmony found themselves in a unique position of being “pre-product and post-revenue.”
The startup officially launched in mid July. In its early-stages, the startup is working off the YC Principle of building things that intentionally don’t scale. Its waitlist is currently filled with B2B SaaS teams, real estate companies, and consulting agencies looking to automate more of their day-to-day tasks around deal flow, finding leads, and time-consuming data entry.
The problem Harmony is solving is one that Munguia experienced while scaling his previous startup ventures. In 2023 he founded ThunderStrike.ai, which generated $150k ARR in contracts in 8 weeks. Coconut, a platform that connects users with qualified virtual assistants, ultimately acquired the startup. Through the acquisition, Munguia became a co-founder of Coconut and scaled the bootstrapped company to millions in ARR.
It was through working with and training virtual assistants that he realized that there was a fundamental flaw in knowledge sharing in the digital world. When trying to put together training, long SOPs (standard operating procedures) or ChatGPT-created training documents did not capture all the important context that a virtual assistant needed to know about individual and granular tasks.
Doing those tasks over and over again forced him to pause and say, ‘could this be automated?’
Behind Harmony’s Pre-Seed
Only a few months in and Harmony has already brought in its pre-seed round. The team closed its $1.6 million round in early July, led by Chattanooga-based Brickyard. Hustle Fund, Interface, Ganas Ventures, Geek Ventures, Ollin Ventures, Recursive Ventures also participated in the round. Individuals like the co-founders of Hubspot, Apollo.io, and Typeform also joined.
As part of the investment, the Harmony team packed up and moved to Brickyard, the startup founder “insulator” in Chattanooga.
The founding team is currently composed of Munugia, Guillermo Sequeira, and Vikranth Reddy Kanumuru.
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Featured photo from Unsplash
