As large corporations grapple with integrating AI into their platforms and processes, they’ve encountered an issue: Generative AI will need to have memory and its training data should be always updated for it to have any practical use. This area is now called “Live AI” and various startups are working on this area including connections And author. Another, Awayjust raised a $10 million seed round to construct live AI systems that the corporate says think and learn in real time like humans.
The round was led by TQ Ventures, with participation from Kadmos, Innovo, Market One Capital, Id4 and angel investors. Another Pathway investor includes Lukasz Kaiser, the co-author of Transformers and a key researcher behind OpenAI's GPT o1.
Pathway's offering includes so-called “infrastructure components” that power live AI systems and depend on structured and unstructured data, meaning enterprise AI platforms could make decisions based on current knowledge. Previous customers include NATO and La Poste, the French postal service.
Zuzanna Stamirowska, co-founder and CEO of Pathway, told TechCrunch in a call: “The way deep learning and LLM assistants work is that you just take the training data after which train models.” But the query is: how do you cope with knowledge, how how do you cope with memory? At the moment, an LLM is acting a bit like a really smart intern on the primary day of the job who is obtainable a book to read. But they will't really remember it. Plus it’s not live, it’s static.”
To treatment this, she said, Pathway “enables developers to construct a pipeline through which they will feed live data into the AI systems.” Currently, we do that within the solicitation phase if you’ve gotten LLM applications or Gen-AI -Create applications.”
Stamirowska – who’s relocating to Menlo Park, California – has assembled a powerful, highly technical team to realize the startup's goals. Its co-founders are CSO Adrian Kosowski and CTO Jan Chorowski, who previously worked with the recent Nobel Prize winner in physics and “Godfather of AI”, Geoff Hinton. Stamirowska herself is the creator of a state-of-the-art forecasting model for a fancy maritime trade network published by the Academy of Sciences of the US.
“The company began with an concept that popped into my head on a sunny morning in Chicago,” she said. “I used to be there accompanying a friend to a scientific conference on theoretical computer science… We had slightly disagreement and I said I even have to start out my very own thing. So I got out my laptop and began writing to people in my network about how I could move this forward. I still remember the taste of the coffee at that moment.”
I asked her where she sees Pathway in comparison with other startups within the industry? “For GenAI engineering and knowledge management use cases, Cohere and Writer appear alongside us in the newest Gartner quadrants,” she said. “In corporate deals, nevertheless, we frequently come across Palantir for AI transformation RFPs, although they’re less product-focused than we’re.”
In an announcement, Schuster Tanger, co-managing director and co-founder of TQ Ventures, said: “Zuzanna and the Pathway team have cutting-edge insights and expertise in some of the exciting areas of recent business… Last and but not least.” At least that was the response of the developers- Community is large.”