Arcade, an AI agent infrastructure startup based by former Okta exec Alex Salazar and former Redis engineer Sam Partee, has raised $12 million from Laude Ventures.
Laude is the brand new fund launched in 2024 by Perplexity co-founder Andy Konwinski, the UC Berkeley pc scientist who additionally co-founded Databricks.
This isn’t the one examine Laude has minimize. However it’s the first publicly introduced one, Laude co-founder and normal associate Pete Sonsini informed TechCrunch. Sonsini is well-known for his years at NEA, the place he led early investments in Databricks, Anyscale, and Perplexity.
As for Salazar, he’s a repeat founder. He landed at Okta after promoting his authentication API startup, Stormpath, to the corporate in 2017. He spent the subsequent few years at Okta as a VP constructing merchandise. Partee, for his half, had been constructing LLM-based purposes and contributing to some key open supply tasks like LangChain and LlamaIndex, in response to Arcade.
When Salazar noticed the debut of ChatGPT 3.5, he noticed the longer term, and his subsequent startup concept: an AI agent firm. Arcade was based in February 2024.
Then he and Partee rapidly found that AI brokers don’t actually work.
“We had been making an attempt to construct a website reliability agent that was going to compete with [companies] like Information Canine,” Salazar mentioned. However “most brokers suck. They don’t do a lot.”
Salazar and Partee stored “beating our heads towards the wall” making an attempt to get their agent simply to hook up with different companies and get the information wanted to do their job.
One purpose, they found, is as a result of many brokers use LLMs educated on public knowledge, however not non-public knowledge. To allow them to, for example, speak about product options however can’t verify that an order was delivered.
The pair determined Arcade would do for AI brokers what Okta once-upon-a-time did for SaaS cloud companies. The founders constructed a tool-calling platform for his or her website reliability agent.
“Folks had been very stunned after we would present them the demo of that agent. They weren’t that within the agent itself,” Salazar mentioned. They wished to know the way they received the agent to really work.
“Finally, we simply checked out one another and mentioned … Why don’t we simply, like, cease with the agent and promote the underlying tool-calling platform?” Salazar mentioned.
Enter Arcade, which helps every agent get entry with the identical privileges to the identical apps and knowledge because the employee it assists, or the job position it performs. Arcade is out there by way of usage-based pricing or subscriptions.
Arcade integrates with OAuth, so it may well deal with the authentications of 1000’s of SaaS companies and web sites. It additionally acts an middleman, offering safe token administration that stops the LLMs themselves from accessing these credentials, Salazar mentioned.
When Sonsini, who had backed Salazar with Stormpath, heard that the founder was doing a brand new startup, he reached out and wished in.
“We’re very, very centered on tremendous technical sort founders, and so we’re very plugged in with the analysis group. We’ve restricted companions which might be researchers,” Sonsini mentioned.
Whereas many AI startup founders are centered on the “shiny object” round LLMs, like brokers, “my background is the decrease ranges, the infrastructure the place billion-dollar companies could be constructed,” Sonsini mentioned. And Arcade “falls proper in that house.”
