Xembly

Xembly was a Seattle, Washington company that built an AI assistant, marketed as an "AI chief of staff" for knowledge workers and surfaced to users under the name Xena. The product used natural language processing and machine learning to analyze conversations across meetings, Slack and email, infer the intent behind them, and then execute the resulting administrative work: meeting note-taking and summarization, action-item extraction and tracking, to-do lists, meeting scheduling and rescheduling, meeting feedback and schedule optimization.

After a meeting, the assistant delivered an AI-generated summary with action items that the host could share with attendees, and could optionally block focus time to complete those items or schedule follow-up meetings. Users interacted with it conversationally through Slack, email, a Chrome extension and inside Google Calendar, where summaries, recordings and notes were accessible without a separate application. The note-taking pipeline was built on a model trained on a dataset of corporate meetings, and the system could be configured to delete items immediately after processing them to address workplace privacy concerns.

The company was founded out of Madrona Venture Labs and launched its service in June 2022, adding schedule-optimization recommendations and task/meeting reminders in the following months. Customer-facing services ceased on June 1 (reported in a June 2024 user review), with the Chrome extension, Slack app and web access no longer functioning.

Founding story

Xembly was created out of Madrona Venture Labs, roughly three years before an August 2023 interview, and was described as born during the pandemic as remote work reshaped meeting culture. Founder and CEO Pete Christothoulou, previously CEO of call and conversational analytics company Marchex, co-launched the company with Peter Francis, who had led global growth at Qualtrics, and Jason Flaks, a founding member of Microsoft's Kinect and HoloLens teams who worked on their natural language and speech recognition efforts. The premise was that work life was not improving while task work kept increasing, and that advances in NLP and machine learning could finally automate that work.

Business model

Xembly sold software-based assistant capabilities to knowledge workers and teams inside companies. At the time of its Series A in October 2022 the product was not yet charged for and new users joined a waitlist. The company later distributed tiered lifetime licenses through the AppSumo marketplace, with account administration and user provisioning handled by the customer's admin.

Initially free during early access (the company did not charge as of October 2022); later offered paid tiered licenses, including lifetime subscriptions sold via AppSumo.

Traction

Early users and customers cited included Convoy, Unearth Technologies, Headway, Salesforce, Qualtrics and Twilio. Headcount was reported at about 25 in October 2022 and about 45 in August 2023. Total capital raised reached $20 million.

Latest developments

A verified AppSumo purchaser reported in June 2024 that Xembly had halted customer-facing services as of June 1, disabling login, the Chrome extension and the Slack and web applications, without advance notice, data-retrieval instructions or a transition plan for lifetime subscribers.