Startup uses AI to help workers, not replace them

Marc Bernstein’s journey from entrepreneurship major at Olin to co-founder of a software startup was short thanks to the close connections between WashU and the St. Louis startup community.

“I’ve known Marc since he was a sophomore in college, he was engaged and passionate about entrepreneurship,” Cliff Holekamp, Olin’s senior lecturer in entrepreneurship told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch in an article profiling Bernstein, BSBA’15, and his co-founder of Balto software. 

Holekamp recalled his former student’s enthusiasm for entrepreneurship, “Over his time in college he [Bernstein] got engaged with the startup scene in St. Louis and started getting excited about software.”

Holekamp, who is also a partner in St. Louis-based VC firm Cultivation Capital, helped Bernstein get a job at TopOPPS, a local software firm that specializes in predictive analytics for sales. There, Bernstein met Chris Kontes who was working at the company as a Venture for America fellow. Together, the two college grads hatched a plan for a new kind of software that uses artificial intelligence to to improve the success rate of sales reps working in call centers.