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Langdock Raises $3M to Boost Workplace Productivity with LLMs
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Langdock Raises $3M to Boost Workplace Productivity with LLMs

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April 20, 2024

Anna Wood is the Editor of Startups Magazine. She joined…

The round also includes participation from Y Combinator and well-known German founders, including Rolf Schrömgens (Trivago), Hanno Renner (Personio), Johannes Reck (GetYourGuide), and Erik Muttersbach (Forto), along with over 25 other angel investors.

Harnessing LLMs for a Competitive Edge

Langdock’s mission is to provide European companies with the tools to safely and securely integrate cutting-edge LLM technology into their workflows. Its model-agnostic platform allows companies to delegate more tasks to LLMs while preserving safety and compliance. Using Langdock, teams can collaborate on dialogues and prompts and create prompt libraries; use more than one LLM, depending on their preference; add their documents and entire company knowledge through integrations to other software tools to the workspace with seamless retrieval augmented generation; benefit from a GPT-like assistant; automate mail drafting and text summarisation.

More than 40 companies are working with Langdock, including German science and tech company Merck and rapidly growing tech companies like GetYourGuide, HeyJobs, and Forto. The platform offers enterprise-grade security, cloud and on-premises solutions, and an intuitive chat interface – allowing colleagues to access LLMs easily across departments. Langdock’s approach to working with fast-moving tech companies helps enterprises easily adopt industry best practices using Langdock’s platform. The rollout at Merck only took three months from agreement to company-wide rollout.

The Future of Work, Powered by AI

The emergence of generative AI, including ChatGPT, in the last 18 months has underlined the opportunity for businesses to increase the productivity and effectiveness of their teams by including generative AI in workflows. The technology can also help European businesses bridge labor gaps caused by a projected workforce shortage in the coming years.

Lennard Schmidt, co-founder and CEO of Langdock, said: “There is an urgent need for European businesses to embrace LLMs because they are seeing a sharp fall in the working-age population. In Germany alone, we are seeing the projected loss of seven million workforce participants. This staggering figure brings into stark focus the critical need for smarter, more efficient processes within companies and the need to enable employees to increase their productivity.”

“Companies are particularly cautious around handling sensitive data, but by working with Langdock, we can ensure businesses are in control of their data and allow them to augment their teams’ knowledge and capacity safely.”

See Also
When global labour market data is released, headlines tend to fixate on a single metric: unemployment. This year is no different. According to the latest figures from the United Nations and the International Labour Organisation, global unemployment remains relatively stable at just under five per cent. At face value, this suggests a labour market that is holding firm despite economic uncertainty, geopolitical instability and technological upheaval. In reality, it masks a serious and underreported problem: the true global jobs crisis is not a lack of work, but the growing scale of informal work. More than 2.1 billion people worldwide are employed in the informal economy, including misclassified workers operating outside effective regulatory coverage, where employment is typically unregistered, contracts are absent or unenforced, and access to labour rights and social protections is limited or non-existent. That represents a large portion of the global workforce. If unemployment reveals how many people cannot find work, informality shows how many are working without protection or long-term opportunity. Informal work is often associated with developing economies or unregulated sectors. However, this form of work is increasingly occurring within developed economies and regulated sectors, hidden within otherwise legitimate, fast-growing small and medium-sized enterprises – and this is often unintentional. For both businesses operating solely in domestic markets and those that have expanded abroad, adopting new workforce models and attempting to respond to rapid technological change, the crisis of informality is emerging in three key areas. The first is worker misclassification. Individuals are engaged as independent contractors but operate in practice like employees – working fulltime, at set hours, for years at a time. This is particularly prevalent in gig and platform-based roles, where algorithms determine pay, hours and performance without considering employment rights. Gig and platform work often presents as flexible and empowering, however, in practice, many platforms exercise employer-like control over payment, performance management, hours, and length of engagement, while explicitly avoiding employer obligations such as tax filings and the provision of statutory benefits like annual leave and healthcare. The result is a growing cohort of workers who fall between legal categories, carrying the risks of self-employment without the autonomy or protections that should accompany this mode of work. The second area is cross-border remote work, where informality can inadvertently arise. With post-COVID remote working models here to stay, companies are directly hiring overseas talent, assuming that because the worker is not based in the company’s home country, local employment laws do not apply. Where employment is not properly registered (whether by the employer and/or employee), local labour law is not applied, or social security obligations are misunderstood or ignored, these arrangements can slip into a form of modern informality, even where the relationship appears to be formal on the surface. This is often the point at which organisations begin to seek external guidance. In many cases, neither party fully understands the legal implications of the arrangement, which leaves both employer and worker exposed. We frequently see organisations approach us when a specific issue surfaces, such as payroll inconsistencies, questions around benefits entitlement, or concerns raised by the workers themselves, including registration process failures. Business leaders should also be aware that permanent establishment risk can arise if a remote employee is deemed to represent the company locally, which can trigger corporate tax obligations. Social security errors can happen when contributions are not made correctly in either jurisdiction, leaving workers without coverage and employers facing backdated liabilities. Meanwhile, employment law conflicts can emerge when contracts fail to meet the requirements of the host country regarding notice periods, benefits or termination rights. The third driver of informality is structural. These arrangements are becoming more common as artificial intelligence and evolving workforce models outpace regulation. Businesses are innovating at speed, but legal frameworks are struggling to keep pace. The UK’s Employment Rights Act offers a clear case study of the direction of travel. Worker protections are expanding, classification rules are tightening and enforcement is becoming more coordinated across agencies. Informal arrangements that once sat in legal grey areas are moving firmly into view and what was previously tolerated is falling under scrutiny. The challenge is that informality is rarely a deliberate choice. For many growing organisations, it becomes the default because compliant pathways are complicated and difficult to navigate alone, particularly across multiple jurisdictions. Legal advice, payroll, tax, HR, and immigration compliance are often siloed, leaving gaps that businesses may not even realise exist until a problem arises. For instance, digital nomad visas are often viewed as providing holders with wholly compliant right to work status, however employers may not realise that this is not always the case and contracts may not reflect the correct legal status or entitlements. Addressing informality requires a change in how we think about employment at a global level and recognising that flexibility and compliance are not mutually exclusive. Businesses need models that allow them to access global talent quickly while ensuring workers are properly employed and protected under local law. As attention remains fixed on unemployment figures, informality continues to expand beneath the surface. It is this hidden cohort of workers, contributing economically without security or rights, that represents the real crisis in the global labour market. Solving it will require coordinated action from policymakers and businesses alike, and a commitment to building workforce models that are not only innovative, but sustainable and fair.
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Merck is one of Germany’s leading businesses and has been an early user of generative AI across their value chain and to support employees. Earlier this year, they worked with Langdock to introduce myGPT Suite, which it has rolled out to its around 63,000 employees.

Walid Mehanna, Chief Data & AI Officer at Merck, said: “We are early adopters of GenAI and see a paradigm shift in how technology can enable our employees to become more effective and efficient in their daily work life. Our collaboration with Langdock is instrumental in creating an AI-enhanced environment at Merck that respects data security and compliance while fostering a culture of continuous improvement and learning.”

Mathieu Bastian, Director of Data Products, ML/AI at GetYourGuide, said: “We needed a powerful and secure AI platform to accelerate the adoption of GenAI solutions to our employees. Langdock already has an impressive product offering to do that, but even more importantly, we see ourselves partnering with their great team to push it forward in the months and years to come.”

2024-04-20

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