Udemy's Founder Is Back: Monogram Raises $40M So AI Does More Than Chat
Three years into the chatbot boom, someone finally said it out loud: a text box has no business being AI's interface.
Three Key Facts
On July 7, Eren Bali — co-founder of Udemy and Carbon Health — pulled his new company Monogram out of stealth with a $40 million seed round. DST Global and Lux Capital led, with Conviction and Gradient Ventures joining, alongside a roster of star angels: Mistral founder Arthur Mensch, Lyft co-founder Logan Green, and Y Combinator chief Garry Tan.
Monogram is an iPhone app built around a visual interface, not chat. Ask it for recipes or a travel plan and it doesn't dump a wall of text — it generates a whole clickable interface on the spot: menus, maps, cards, spun up in about 1.5 seconds on average. Under the hood, it runs on OpenAI's models.
Bali's thesis is blunt: text boxes are a bad interface for AI. What he wants, he says, is "a very high-frequency, efficient, productive interface between human and AI" — not users typing into a chat window and waiting for a paragraph back.
WangDou's Take
Eren Bali's story is the stuff of legend — raised in a remote Turkish village, an International Math Olympiad medalist, founder of Udemy and then Carbon Health, knocked down and back up each time. This time he's betting on something counterintuitive: ChatGPT made the whole world fall in love with the chat box, and he's flatly declaring the chat box wrong. It sounds like asking for trouble, but there's logic to it — ask an AI to book a flight and it hands you a 300-word plan you still have to read line by line and then type to confirm. That's efficiency? Wouldn't a tappable map be nicer? The catch: a $40 million seed, no disclosed valuation, and a product built on OpenAI's models — which is shaky. What if OpenAI decides to build the interface layer itself one day? Bali is betting that the interaction layer is thick and hard enough that the giants won't get to it soon. DST and Lux aren't really betting on the product; they're betting on the man who's been knocked down twice and is still standing. Whether generating an interface in 1.5 seconds actually feels good to use — that we'll only know once millions of people tap it daily. For now, it's a beautiful demo.
Source: Yahoo Finance · Wilson Sonsini · Tech Startups