AI “agents” are generative AI models that may autonomously perform actions equivalent to copying information from an email and pasting it right into a spreadsheet. They are celebrated as Productivity compressors. This could also be a bit premature, considering that models are inclined to make mistakes. But a minimum of some founders (and Analysts And Investors) appear to be convinced that agents are the subsequent frontier of generative AI.
Bella Liu and William Lu are two of those founders. Their company, Orby AIis constructing a generative AI platform that seeks to automate plenty of different business processes, including workflows that involve data entry, document processing, and form validation.
Many startups offer tools to automate repetitive, monotonous back-office business processes (see Parabola, Tines, Sam Altman-backed Induced AI, and Tektonic AI, to call a number of). Established corporations like Automation Anywhere and UiPath have also turned to AI to maintain up with the generative AI competition.
But Liu and Lu say Orby's technology stands out for its ability to learn and reply to workflows in real time and understand the patterns and relationships in a company's unstructured data.
“Orby's platform observes how employees do their jobs to routinely create automations for complex tasks that require a certain level of reasoning and understanding,” explained Liu, CEO of Orby. “An AI agent installed on a employee's computer effectively observes, learns and generates automations, adjusting the model because it learns more.”
With Orby, which was launched quietly in 2023, Liu and Lu said they desired to create an AI that might understand and abstract a number of the fundamental decisions employees make, allowing employees to concentrate on more essential things.
Liu previously led AI and automation efforts at IBM, including product planning and AI-related mergers and acquisitions, and was director of AI product management at UiPath. Lu is a former Nvidia systems engineer who joined Google Cloud as a technical lead, helping to develop generative AI technology for document and database extraction.
Orby's supposed secret weapon is a cloud-based generative AI model tuned to perform client tasks, equivalent to validating expense reports. The model is predicated partly on symbolic AI, a type of AI that uses rules equivalent to mathematical theorems to derive solutions to problems.
Symbolic AI alone may be inflexible and slow, especially when processing large and complex datasets. It requires well-defined knowledge and context to work well. However, recent research has shown that it’s scalable when combined with traditional AI model architectures.
“We have spent the past two years developing this AI model and conducting successful tests,” Liu said. “There are few pure generative AI corporations which might be attacking the enterprise head-on with an end-to-end offering. We are certainly one of them.”
Liu says Orby's model can intelligently adapt to changes in workflows, equivalent to when an app's UI is updated, by analyzing API interactions and an worker's browser usage. Having software monitor an worker's every move feels like a looming privacy disaster. But Liu claims Orby doesn't actually store customer data; it just uses it to fine-tune its model and encrypts the information each in transit and at rest.
“Humans remain completely within the feedback loop,” she added.
Orby, which recently raised $30 million in a Series A funding round led by New Enterprise Associates and Wing and has a post-money valuation of over $100 million, in accordance with sources, is competing in a difficult sector. The impending agent-based AI from generative AI heavyweights like OpenAI and Anthropic has dampened the prospects of each established and smaller players.
Adept, a startup developing AI agent technology with a concentrate on enterprise applications, is According to reports is near an acquisition take care of Microsoft before it might even bring a single product to market. Amazon and Google have quietly released AI agent tools. UiPath, then again, despite increasing its generative AI initiatives last yr, reported revenues the plum within the last financial quarter.
Liu says Orby can get ahead with a scientific go-to-market approach. The company already generates revenue from a few dozen customers and plans to make use of its $35 million war chest to expand its team of about 30 people in Mountain View.
“The funds shall be used to scale our go-to-market, customer support, product and engineering organizations,” she said. “The enterprise market has an insatiable appetite for generative AI solutions which might be proven to enhance business performance. They're just attempting to work out where they will best deploy the technology within the short term before scaling it across the enterprise.”
