Another sign that the current VC appetite for AI is insatiable, Adepta startup building AI that “enables humans and computers to creatively collaborate to solve problems,” announced yesterday that it has raised $350 million in a Series B funding round led by General Catalyst and Spark Capital with participation from Addition, Greylock, Atlassian Ventures, Microsoft, Nvidia, Workday Ventures, Caterina Fake, Frontiers Capital, PSP Growth, SV Angel and A.Capital.
Forbes reports that the valuation was “at least” $1 billion.
The cash infusion brings Adept’s total revenue to $415 million, which co-founder and CEO David Luan says will be spent on production, model training and staff growth. “Giant base models for language and example have shown amazing capabilities in recent years. Adept builds on this momentum through a new kind of base model that can perform actions in natural language on any software tool,” he said in a press release.
“Foundation model” is a bit of jargon. But Adept’s vision, at a high level, is to create what it calls an “AI teammate” trained to use a wide variety of different software tools and APIs. Rather than exploring ways to generate text or images, like startups OpenAI and Stability AI, Adept is studying how people use computers — specifically how they surf the web and navigate software — to train an AI model that can read text instructions. can convert into sequences of digital actions.
Adept is not alone in exploring this idea. In a February 2022 paper, scientists at Alphabet reported that DeepMind had an AI observes keyboard and mouse commands of humans performing “instruction-following” computing tasks, such as booking a flight, to learn how to do them themselves. Elsewhere, DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman has collaborated teamed up with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman to launch Inflection AI, which aims to use AI to help people work more efficiently with computers.
However, competition does not deter investors, no doubt because of the significant market opportunities. In a recent questionnaire of Intel-owned Cnvrg.io’s AI professionals, nearly 50% said they believe the organization’s investment in AI development will increase despite the macroeconomic climate.
Adept is currently running lean, with only 25 employees. But it is Reportedly experienced a high level of revenue and lost two of its co-founders, Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, to another startup in recent months.
This apparently did not disrupt product development. Adept’s MVP, named ACT-1, can perform tasks such as importing LinkedIn URLs into recruiting software, according to Forbes. ACT-1 appears as an overlay window on top of existing software such as Google Chrome or Salesforce. A prototype is ready for desktop, but will also be coming to mobile in the near future.
The versatility of ACT-1 apparently attracted strategic investors such as Microsoft, Nvidia, Atlassian and Workday, all of which are releasing software that could one day take advantage of its AI assistant.
General Catalyst’s Deep Nishar had this to say: “Adept… possesses deep expertise to deliver a commercial product that pushes the generative AI frontier beyond text and image modalities into the practical realm of knowledge worker actions. It is exciting that ACT-1 has the potential to lower the barrier to entry within the company’s workforce and thus deliver more inclusive prosperity.”
Janice has been with businesskinda for 5 years, writing copy for client websites, blog posts, EDMs and other mediums to engage readers and encourage action. By collaborating with clients, our SEO manager and the wider businesskinda team, Janice seeks to understand an audience before creating memorable, persuasive copy.