While working at Coursera and later Google over the past decade, there have been again and again when Jiquan Ngiam would see an engineering function that might be automated to support non-developers. Nevertheless, there have been never enough resources to try this.
Ngiam got along with five friends earlier this 12 months, including Vijay Vasudevan, who had worked with him at Google, to take a look at the models artificial intelligence got here up with for the cloud, for instance, to do reasoning, planning and coding.
“It made me think in regards to the ability of those models to generate code and reasoning, then work out the environment about making it more useful for non-engineers,” Ngiam told TechCrunch. “There was this query about can these models now code in a way that interconnects all of the software we use to then do very useful things for us reliably and securely.”
They got down to construct specialized assistants that provide help to with all types of tasks. Some examples they thought they may apply AI workflows were to tame a busy inbox or manage Slack connections with customers.
What resulted was Lutra AI. The young startup, began in April, creates AI workflows from natural language so no technical experience is required. It integrates with existing apps, like Google Workspaces and Slack, and enables automation for tasks like email management and web research.
Lutra is the most recent company to tackle AI workflow, joining corporations like Respell, Unity, Parabola and even a giant tech company like Nvidia. Nevertheless, Ngiam sees Lutra breaking away from the pack in a couple of ways: One, Lutra takes a code-first approach to this problem. This manner there’s more security and reliability through the execution of those AI workflows so data is protected. Two, while other corporations use large language models for every part, Lutra is concentrating the LLMs on certain tasks that can yield higher results.
Lutra recently got here out of stealth after closing on $3.8 million in seed funding in a round that included Coatue Ventures, Hustle Fund, Maven Ventures, WVV Capital and a bunch of angel investors, including Andrej Karpathy, Jeff Dean and Scott Belsky.
The corporate is in private beta with a small number of consumers, and Ngiam says the corporate is just too early to share traction presently. With the brand new funding, he plans to open up Lutra to more customers and give attention to product development and product market fit.
“All of us have this digital presence and use rather a lot more software today than we did 10 years ago,” Ngiam said. “When I feel long-term, all of those technologies are well embedded into corporations today, so that is the moment to supply tools that integrate across all of the software uses, thereby empowering your enterprise to operate much more effectively.”