Venture Capital investors are showing no signs of slowing down their investment in Artificial Intelligence, as evidenced by the $350 million Series B funding round for Adept, a company which creates AI that allows humans and machines to collaborate to solve problems. General Catalyst and Spark Capital were the main financial backers of the round, but they were joined by a host of other investors including Addition, Greylock, Atlassian Ventures, Microsoft, Nvidia, Workday Ventures, Caterina Fake, Frontiers Capital, PSP Growth, SV Angel, and A.Capital.
According to Forbes, the value is estimated to be a minimum of one billion dollars.
The cash injection has taken Adept’s total funds raised up to $415 million. According to company co-founder and CEO David Luan, this money is being used to develop products, enhance training models and expand staffing. In a press release, Luan commented “Recent years have seen giant foundation models for language and images possess remarkable capabilities. Adept is developing a novel foundation model that can carry out commands on any software program utilizing natural language.”
Adept’s goal is to build an “AI companion” that can learn to use a multitude of software programs and APIs. This is different from OpenAI and Stability AI, which focus on creating images and text. Adept is examining how people utilize computers, such as how they surf the web and use software, to create an AI model that can interpret text commands into a series of digital tasks.
Not only Adept has been looking into this concept. A February 2022 study found that researchers at Alphabet-backed DeepMind used AI to watch keyboard and mouse action when people were doing computer jobs such as reserving a flight, so that it could learn how to do them itself. Additionally, Mustafa Suleyman, DeepMind’s co-founder, partnered up with Reid Hoffman, one of the founders of LinkedIn, to establish Inflection AI, which seeks to employ AI to make humans more efficient when utilizing computers.
Investor enthusiasm is unabated in spite of the competition, likely due to the potential of the marketplace. An Intel-owned Cnvrg.io poll of AI experts showed that almost half of respondents thought that companies would keep investing in AI, despite the economic conditions.
Adept is presently functioning with a small staff of 25 employees. It is said that there has been some executive-level changes, with two of its creators, Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, leaving to join another startup in recent times.
It appears that the transition to remote working has had no effect on the progress of product development. According to Forbes, Adept’s minimal viable product (MVP) – known as ACT-1 – is able to carry out tasks such as bringing LinkedIn URLs into recruiting platforms. ACT-1 appears as an overlay window on top of existing programs like Google Chrome or Salesforce. A prototype has been completed for desktop use, and a mobile version should be available soon.
The lure of what ACT-1 could do clearly drew in big-name investors such as Microsoft, Nvidia, Atlassian, and Workday; all of whom offer programs that may take advantage of its AI assistant in the future.
Deep Nishar of General Catalyst commented that Adept has the capability to improve AI technology beyond the limits of text and pictures, making it applicable to the tasks of knowledge workers. He believes that ACT-1 has the potential to make the labor force more accessible, thus increasing overall prosperity.
