AI startup Emergence AI is raising a lot of money to make office workers more productive

Emergence AI, a generative artificial intelligence startup focused on making business workers more productive, today announced that it has closed a $97.2 million funding round led by Learn Capital.

The startup said that in addition to these funds, it also secured credit lines totaling over $100 million. For a company that says it’s only now emerging from stealth mode, that means a huge amount and suggests the company has big ambitions, to say the least.

These ambitions fall within the realm of generative AI “agents” that go beyond simply responding to user queries and prompts and actually perform various work-related tasks on behalf of users.

A startup that is a branch of the educational chatbot company Merlyn Mind Inc. is working on an “agent-based” artificial intelligence system that can perform many of the tasks commonly performed by knowledge workers. It does this not by using its own AI models, but by understanding what needs to be done and outsourcing those tasks to third-party models such as OpenAI’s GPT-4o.

Emergence’s core project, known as “Agent E,” aims to automate tasks such as filling out forms, searching for products on retail sites, and finding content on streaming services like Netflix. The company has already created and released a prototype of Agent E, which is trained on both human annotated and synthetic data.

Orchestrating LLM

Emergence co-founder and CEO Satya Nitta told TechCrunch that Agent E is best described as an “orchestrator” that acts as an intermediary, processing user requests and finding the most appropriate large language model to accomplish the task. For example, if a user asks Agent E to write an email, it will understand the request and then find the best model to do it, based on the curated LLM list.

The CEO said that developers who integrate Agent E into their applications will have a lot of flexibility in what they can do. For example, they can “switch to the latest open source or generic model on demand, without having to worry about things like cost, rapid migration or availability,” he said.

Nitta told TechCrunch that he founded Emergence after realizing that some of the technologies developed at Merlyn Mind could be applied to automating various business tasks. He explained that while existing LLMs have extremely powerful language understanding capabilities, they lack the planning and reasoning skills necessary to perform complex automation tasks, even if they understand the user’s request.

While Agent E is open source, Emergence ultimately wants to monetize its orchestrator tool through a premium, subscription-based application programming interface. This service will be able to perform almost any job-related task, Nitta said. For example, it will be able to process claims and documents, manage IT systems, provide customer service and more.

The startup has already established a strategic partnership with Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. and Newline Interactive Inc. and plans to integrate AI Orchestrator technology into these companies’ products. Initially, these partnerships will focus on display technologies, and we can expect to see AI productivity-enhancing features in Samsung’s WAD interactive displays and Newline’s Q and Q Pro displays, Nitta said.

Emergence claims to be doing something innovative, but it appears to have quite a few rivals that are also specifically focused on creating more efficient AI agents. Rivals include companies such as Google LLC and OpenAI, as well as startups such as Sierra Technologies Inc., which is developing conversational AI agents that can take actions on behalf of employees. Others include Orby AI Inc., which trains AI agents to work with a wide range of computer software, and Adept AI Labs Inc., another AI automation startup that says it focuses on “general intelligence.”

Time will tell which of these companies will ultimately prevail in the emerging field of AI agents, and whether any of them will succeed at all. What is noteworthy is that Adept AI, despite raising a massive $350 million funding round in March 2023, is reportedly currently suffering from a lack of funds and is desperately looking for rescue from companies such as Microsoft Corp. and Meta Platforms Inc.

Photo: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer