Serial tech entrepreneurs Dan Mallin and Scott Litman have done it again: Lucy, their AI-driven knowledge management tool has been acquired by Capacity, a St. Louis-based AI-powered support automation platform that serves more than 2,500 companies.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but Litman, Mallin and co-founder/chief technology officer Marc Dispensa will join the Capacity leadership team to oversee product integration. Lucy’s 30-person staff—about half of whom work out of the company’s Minneapolis headquarters—will also join Capacity.

This is the fifth acquisition or exit of a Mallin/Litman tech startup, starting with Imaginet in the 1990s and Magnet 360, a marketing tech firm they sold to Mindtree in 2016 for a reported $50 million. Beyond their own startups, the duo has become synonymous with Minnesota’s entrepreneurial ecosystem as founders of MN Cup, now in its 20th year and the largest startup competition of its kind in the nation.

Founded in 2015, Lucy’s signature product is the Answer Engine, designed to mine an enterprise organization’s internal data to help employees find answers quickly. As the company describes, “Lucy breaks down knowledge silos and makes every team and individual more efficient and productive.” PepsiCo and Kraft Heinz are among the multinationals now using Lucy’s technology.

“How many PowerPoints are created every day inside a company like Pepsi,” Mallin asks, by way of explaining Lucy’s efficiencies. “Lucy can read/watch/listen to all of the PowerPoints, PDFs, consumer reports—all of it, and find the answer. Lucy can do in seconds what a team of 20 couldn’t do in a year.”

Lucy is one of three companies just acquired by Capacity, bringing its total number of acquisitions to eight in less than two years. “We’re at an inflection point for AI and many businesses are realizing that they need a complete platform to be successful, rather than cobbled together point solutions,” Capacity CEO David Karandish said in a statement. “We continue to execute on a compound startup strategy which reflects what our customers are asking for: an all-in-one AI platform that delivers across all communication channels.”

Lucy and Capacity’s AI products were being used by businesses long before AI became a mainstream fascination with the release of ChatGPT.

“Currently everyone thinks AI is generative AI, but we’ve been using AI for 20 years and Lucy’s primary function is retrieving answers, independent of generative AI,” Mallin explained. “We are just scratching the surface of what is possible with AI and what’s coming in the near term. The use cases are infinite; the value to the world is unbelievable.”

In the case of Lucy, “this is augmented intelligence,” Mallin said. “It makes workers better.”

More broadly speaking, Mallin acknowledges that AI will likely eliminate some jobs, but views it as a natural evolution. “The whole country used to work on farms. Then we replaced farmers with tools and people went to work in factories. As factory equipment was automated, we became knowledge workers.”

The question now, he said, is what is the next transition? Instead of worrying that AI will replace human workers, Mallin takes a more optimistic view that AI could redefine the work week.

“I think there’s a future where we don’t have to work 40-50-60 hours a week. Where we can do the same amount of work in less time,” Mallin said. “But if we replace everybody with AI, there are no consumers to buy goods. The economy doesn’t work unless we keep people employed and make life better with tech.”