David Karandish’s entrepreneurial instincts run deep. He laughs, recalling childhood experiments and side hustles like rigging up a toy car alarm to alert him when his parents entered his room and selling candy door-to-door as a Cub Scout. What he didn’t know at the time was that this mentality would eventually lead to a near billion-dollar exit with Answers.com.
Then, in December 2016, Karandish’s entrepreneurial instincts came to life for the second time. As most of the world was filling shopping carts with books, toys, and video games, Amazon’s Alexa became the season’s best-seller. For Karandish, this was more than a holiday trend, it was a signal.
“If the top-selling product in the world is a consumer-facing AI, and it frankly wasn’t even that good yet, then the impact in the workplace was going to be massive,” Karandish recalls. By early 2017, he had founded Capacity, an AI-powered support automation platform with a simple but audacious idea: what if AI could automate support across every interaction?
From Consumer Curiosity to Enterprise Necessity
Capacity began by tackling internal pain points: HR and IT requests that bog down teams. Over time, the company expanded into customer support, and today powers omnichannel automation across email, tickets, phone calls, and SMS. The secret, Karandish insists, wasn’t justtraining AI to answer questions, it was ensuring a smooth handoff when the machine hits its limits.
“Even if you can answer 93% of questions automatically, you can’t just throw up a shrug emoji on the rest. You need seamless escalation between virtual agents and humans,” he says.
That ability to move fluidly between bot and human support is what Karandish believes many competitors missed, and what Capacity made central to its platform.
The Data Problem No One Escapes
When asked about the most underestimated challenge in enterprise AI, Karandish doesn’t hesitate: data.
“AI is only as good as the data it has access to. If you give it bad, stale data, it will do its best to get around it, but it can’t solve what it can’t see.”
That hard truth shapes Capacity’s product philosophy, ensuring integrations and workflows are designed to connect the right systems in the right way.
In practice, that means a customer can start a conversation with a virtual agent, which triggers a workflow, involves both automated and human tasks, and cascades into updates across Salesforce, SharePoint, HubSpot, or vertical-specific systems.
Scaling With Intent
Capacity has raised over $100 million in funding, with Karandish himself investing in every round.
Today, Capacity counts 20,000 customers worldwide and reports north of $60 million in annual recurring revenue. Strategic acquisitions, from Lucy to SmartAction to Linc, have expanded its reach across retail, e-commerce, and enterprise support.
Karandish is clear-eyed about the future of AI in the workplace. While hype abounds, he sees Capacity’s opportunity as connecting systems, people, and processes in ways that eliminate wasted effort.
As he puts it, “I’ve always loved creating things. Whether it’s an alarm in my bedroom or an AI platform connecting thousands of enterprises, that’s the energy that drives me.”
