Netherlands based AI-startup Neople reflects on on a year of rapid growth in AI-driven employees

‘S Hertogenbosch, 16 January 2024 - Neople, a fast growing AI-startup in the Netherlands, celebrates their one-year anniversary, marking a year of innovation, milestones and promising trajectory for the future. As an employment agency for AI-driven digital co-workers, Neople aims to assist humans in their daily tasks and boost creativity, by designing the perfect AI companion that understands individual needs and integrates seamlessly into work environments. Neople was in the news recently for raising 1.5 million euros, within the first five months of being founded, closing the deal with venture capital companies Peak and Curiosity AI in 6 weeks.‍

“The past year has been one of commendable growth for Neople, going from 0 to 26 employees, prompting three office relocations in one year to accommodate the expanding team! Over the span of one year, we have also added more than 50 clients to our roster, such as Vitaminstore and PSV,” according to Bas Ploeg, Co-founder of Neople. 

The startup offers Neople (derived from "new" and "people") to customers as their new digital colleagues, who collaborate through contact centres, Slack, email and various other business systems, working side by side with their human counterparts. From the very beginning, Neople has strived to understand and tackle the difficulty organisations face in incorporating advanced AI technologies into regular work situations. With a unique human-centric approach, Neople is committed to enable everyone, irrespective of their level of familiarity and knack with technology, to access and benefit from cutting edge technology solutions. 

‍“Despite the sheer volume of AI tools and platforms launched every day, they are not accessible to the non-tech-savvy majority. Neople aims to change that. Companies of all kinds should be able to leverage the potential of AI to innovate and expand. It’s only then that the industry’s digital revolution will come to a full circle.”, says Hans de Penning, CEO and Co-founder of Neople. ‍

The evolution of conversational AI is disrupting the way organisations approach internal communication as well as customer engagement— chatbots and virtual assistants are employed to streamline internal communication, automate routine tasks, facilitate collaboration and enhance customer support, to name a few instances. Touted as the next wave of generative AI, conversational AI’s increasing popularity can be attributed to its ability to use inference and reasoning to process information, and generate human-like responses. Its capacity to understand and adapt to individual preferences presents businesses with new opportunities to forge deeper connections internally with employees as well as externally with customers, providing highly personalised and responsive interactions.

With active presence in the Netherlands, Belgium, Spain, and England currently, plans for expansion into new markets are in the works for Neople. The company is gearing up to diversify their offerings by introducing a new product — an AI assistant in other departments of a company, such as marketing, sales or HR colleagues. A Neople can process and analyse a large amount of data and perform tasks proactively which is applicable to various roles.  Additionally, the company is also working on features where multiple digital colleagues can collaborate with each other in different roles. This allows the physical colleagues to focus on other things that would require their attention.

‍About Neople

Dutch startup Neople, founded in 2023, aims to transform the workplace through innovation and optimization by developing the perfect AI partner. The company's mission is to democratise technology and make it accessible to people, regardless of their technical skills. Neople operates as a sort of temporary staffing agency for digital colleagues, enabling companies to integrate AI capabilities into their work environment, tailored to their specific workflows and existing technology stack, to support their teams.

‍About Hans de Penning

Hans (30), a graduate engineer from TU/e and a familiar face in the entrepreneurial world since the age of 20. Prior to this, he was the founder of start-ups Vention and Amber (exit: Mywheels), and since early 2023, he has been involved with Neople to make artificial intelligence accessible to all employees. While at Amber, he witnessed the rapid developments in AI, as well as the challenges companies faced in keeping up with them. Simultaneously, due to the current tight labour market, the workload for support staff increased rapidly. He believed there had to be a better and smarter way. Fueled by a shared passion to address this problem, he, along with co-founders Job Nijenhuis, Bas Ploeg, Menno Zevenbergen, and Sander Kok, started the 'temporary staffing agency for digital colleagues.’