Adept, an artificial intelligence company co-founded by a former engineer at OpenAI, has raised $350 million to develop tools that can actually execute commands based on human prompts rather than giving written responses.
(Bloomberg) — Adept, an artificial intelligence company co-founded by a former engineer at OpenAI, has raised $350 million to develop tools that can actually execute commands based on human prompts rather than giving written responses.
General Catalyst and Spark Capital led the funding round, which follows Adept’s previous $65 million round in early 2022, the company said in a statement Tuesday. The funds will support the San Francisco-based startup’s product development, model training, and headcount growth. Forbes previously reported the funding and said it would value the company post-money at at “at least $1 billion.” Adept didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment on its valuation.
Adept is raising funds as the venture capital community is still reeling from the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank and the broader tech downturn. Tech startup accelerator Y Combinator said Monday it was ending its late-stage startup fund.
There’s been a lot of excitement over OpenAI’s ChaGPT, which generates humanlike responses to simple prompts, or Dall-E, which creates images. And a wide range of businesses have scrambled to incorporate the technology into their products. But Adept aims to go one step further than having AI give answers to questions, by having the software actually performing the task.
Adept envisions the future of computing as one where natural language interfaces help people work more efficiently and productively, the company said. Its goal is to build an “AI teammate,” trained on every software tool and API for every knowledge worker that would be able to interpret natural language requests and perform them directly. Adept is building tools that work “hand-in-hand with the user” on existing software programs. Engineers would be able to offload tasks to the automated “teammate” and free up their own time.
“Giant foundation models for language and for images have shown astounding capabilities in the last few years,” said co-founder and Chief Executive Officer David Luan. “Adept is building on this momentum via a new kind of foundation model.” Luan was director and vice president of engineering at OpenAI from 2017 until 2020, according to his LinkedIn profile. Adept’s chief scientist and chief technology officer are former Google Brain researchers.
(Updates to note reported valuation.)
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