Alphy Inc., a Coeur d'Alene-based tech startup, is quickly growing and catching the attention of investors, industry leaders, and other companies. 

Julian Guthrie, the company's founder and CEO, says Alphy's artificial intelligence-powered tools have been trained to detect and correct harmful and unlawful communications in the workplace, in real time. 

The company's AI software, dubbed HarmCheck, has been integrated into Outlook, Microsoft Teams, and Google’s suite of products, Guthrie says. It can detect over 40 high-risk categories of harmful language in work settings, such as discrimination, covert language, and retaliation, among other classifiers. Guthrie claims the AI has accuracy detection rates in the 90th percentile, above industry standard. 

“The world has spell check and grammar check; we are harm check," Guthrie says. "We want to detect it. We want to stop it and at the same time, advance more collaborative communication." 

As a person is preparing an email or working on any of these applications, HarmCheck reviews the language in real time and lists potential harm in a side panel. The application also can be used by a company on its back end to monitor employee communications, she says. 

"We're not policing your words, but we're protecting your company and your employees," Guthrie says. 

Spokane telecommunications entrepreneur Greg Green, an angel investor and adviser to Guthrie, says the banking industry in particular is fascinated with Alphy’s potential to mitigate harm. He cites how many financial institutions are paying millions of dollars in lawsuits stemming from covert communication from employees who use unapproved, hidden communication channels to discuss business matters.   

U.S. and Securities Exchange Commission data show the SEC brought off-channel record-keeping cases resulting in more than $600 million in civil penalties against 70 firms last year. Since December of 2021, it has charged more than 100 firms and more than $2 billion in penalties. 

Guthrie says that while AI platforms like Chat GPT can be queried to produce, for example, 100 sentences on discriminatory racism, the AI will output a few, but become redundant and repetitive, degrading the quality of the AI. 

"So you need skilled humans in the loop," she says. "Which is reassuring for us word geeks."  

Guthrie and a team of journalists spent three years defining and researching covert language. The team has also meticulously read through legal statutes that pertain to heavily regulated industries, such as Fair Housing Laws, Equal Credit Opportunity, and Truth in Lending, and used that language to train the AI to detect possible transgressions against these laws. 

"The antiquated AI used by some of our competitors is OK, but it is reliant on dictionary word lists. It's lexicon-based," Guthrie says. "Ours has moved into a contextual understanding of what is being said." 

Guthrie says she’s already been approached for possible acquisition or acquihire, through which a company would acquire the company's assets and bring her on as an employee. That, she asserts, is a reflection of the interest and demand of Alphy’s technology.

Green notes the positive overtures from other companies bodes well for Alphy. His advice to Guthrie, however, is to grow the company like she will own it forever. 

"People are talking about this tiny company in North Idaho, wanting to bring this on as a product offering," he says. 

Alphy was founded in 2021 and has 12 employees, including AI trainers and architects, a software engineer, a software developer, and an editorial director. Four of the company’s staff, including Guthrie, are based in Coeur d’Alene. Guthrie says the startup is beginning to get increased momentum, requiring her to raise more funds to scale and hire more people to meet demand. 

While the company doesn't have a dedicated physical location, Guthrie often works out of the Innovation Collective, at 418 E. Lakeside. 

To date, Alphy has raised just over $4 million, garnering interest from local angel investors and venture capitalist firms. 

Local angel investors include Shawn Swanby, CEO of Post Falls-based Ednetics Inc.; Todd Sullivan, an Inland Northwest homebuilder; and Green. 

Other investors include Kevin Scott, chief technology officer of Microsoft Corp., Jim Goetz, partner at Sequoia Capital Operations LLC, and William Hearst, chairman of Hearst Media. 

Alphy also has investments from three investment firms, including Boise, Idaho-based Capital Eleven, LLC, The Emerson Collective of California, and New Jersey-based True Equity. 

Alphy's board of advisers includes Green, Hearst, and Phillip Brittan, vice president at Google LLC. 

Green, a longtime Inland Northwest entrepreneur who, among his ventures, co-founded Fatbeam LLC, says he was impressed with Guthrie and the team she assembled, calling Alphy a natural fit in the digital age.                                     

“These days, everything has AI—there is a lot of overexpression," says Green, referring to AI's ubiquitous presence and reproduction. "But in this case, it has legs.”

Guthrie says Alphy’s customers include three of the world’s largest banks, a consulting firm, a handful of small businesses, and a data archiving firm for financial services. The small businesses were beta testers for Alphy and are now transitioning to paid customers, Guthrie says.

Alphy is generating revenue and is expected to be profitable by the fourth quarter, she says. 

Guthrie grew up in Spokane and spent 20 years as a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle. She's also a best-selling author. She says the continuum in her career from reporter to CEO is her love of words, language, and storytelling.

“I believe in the power of words to help or harm us, to connect or divide us,” she says. 

Guthrie returned to the Inland Northwest from San Francisco in the summer of 2020 after completing her first financing round for Alphy. With the onset of the pandemic, she decided to return home to be closer to family and friends and build her startup remotely.

Her inspiration for building a tech company came after publishing her fourth nonfiction book, Alpha Girls, about women who succeed in male-dominated industries.

After chronicling their stories, Guthrie decided she wanted to create a technology that could help companies better recruit, retain, and advance women. The startup’s name is a reference to the book's title, she says. Three of the four women Guthrie chronicled in Alpha Girls are professional investors and have invested in Alphy. They are Theresia Gouw, Sonja Perkins, and MJ Elmore. 

Guthrie hired a team of former journalists to do research, define words, and write. As time went on, she began to get interest from potential customers who wanted to know if Alphy could detect harm, and less interest in technology to advance women. 

“I went where the market was saying there is a big opportunity; it was a definite pivot,” Guthrie says. “Someone told me once that for a startup, pivoting is finding your way home, and I think that's what we've done because it's still about the love of language, but now it's mitigating harm that comes to companies and individuals through unlawful, unethical communication." 

Guthrie says she sees the opportunity to further expand into other sectors such as government, education, and health care. 

Looking ahead, Guthrie says she wants to broaden the training of the software to understand the authentic voice spoken in industries and build classifiers for specific sectors like energy companies, entertainment, or a sports franchise. 

"What is the actual language that they are using, and how can we detect when they are going off-channel?" she says. "I'm still a reporter at heart because it's good to go through life asking questions."