In one other sign that the present VC appetite for AI is insatiable, Adept, a startup constructing AI that “enables humans and computers to work together creatively to unravel problems,” yesterday announced that it raised $350 million in a Series B funding round co-led by General Catalyst and Spark Capital with participation from Addition, Greylock, Atlassian Ventures, Microsoft, Nvidia, Workday Ventures, Caterina Fake, Frontiers Capital, PSP Growth, SV Angel and A.Capital.

Forbes reports that the valuation was “a minimum of” $1 billion.

The money injection brings Adept’s total raised to $415 million, which co-founder and CEO David Luan says is being put toward productization, model training and headcount growth. “Giant foundation models for language and for images have shown astounding capabilities in the previous couple of years. Adept is constructing on this momentum via a latest sort of foundation model that may perform actions on any software tool using natural language,” he said in a press release.

“Foundation model” is a bit jargony. But Adept’s vision, at a high level, is to create what it refers to as an “AI teammate” trained to make use of a wide range of various software tools and APIs. As an alternative of investigating ways to generate text or images, like startups OpenAI and Stability AI, Adept’s studying how people use computers — specifically how they browse the online and navigate software — to coach an AI model that may turn text instructions into sets of digital actions.

Adept isn’t the just one exploring this concept. In a February 2022 paper, scientists at Alphabet-backed DeepMind had an AI observe keyboard and mouse commands from people completing “instruction-following” computer tasks, like booking a flight, to learn find out how to do them itself. Elsewhere, DeepMind co-founder Mustafa Suleyman has teamed up with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman to launch Inflection AI, which goals to make use of AI to assist humans work more efficiently with computers.

The competition isn’t scaring investor away, though — little doubt due to the substantial market opportunity. In a recent survey of AI professionals by Intel-owned Cnvrg.io, nearly 50% said that they consider organization investment in AI development will increase despite the macroeconomic climate.

Adept is running lean for now, with just 25 employees. However it’s reportedly experienced some high-level turnover, losing two of its co-founders, Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar, to a different startup in recent months.

That hasn’t disrupted product development, apparently. Adept’s MVP, called ACT-1, can perform tasks like importing LinkedIn URLs into recruiting software, in accordance with Forbes. ACT-1 displays as an overlay window on top of existing software like Google Chrome or Salesforce. A prototype is prepared for desktop, but may also come to mobile within the near future.

The flexibility of ACT-1 evidently attracted strategic investors like Microsoft, Nvidia, Atlassian and Workday, all of which market software that may someday profit from its AI assistant.

General Catalyst’s Deep Nishar had this to say: “Adept … possesses a depth of experience to deliver a industrial product that pushes the generative AI frontier beyond text and image modalities into the sensible realm of data employee actions. Excitingly, ACT-1 has the potential to lower the barrier to entry throughout the enterprise workforce and thus may yield greater inclusive prosperity.”