Earlier this week, we wrote about investment trends popping up at seed stage. However, we left out one area where funding activity was so voluminous it warranted its own dedicated piece.
Unsurprisingly, it is about AI. More specifically, Crunchbase data shows a continued boom this year in seed-stage funding to startups working on autonomous AI agents, assistants and companions, with a particular focus on enterprise customers.
“It’s the next evolution of doing work,” said Terrence Rohan, managing director of Otherwise Fund, a seed investor network, and a former Figma board director.
While the SaaS boom that began in the mid-2000s was all about giving enterprises “power tools” to enhance productivity, Rohan said this next phase is about applications that can actually do jobs themselves. And among startups, progress toward this goal is moving fast.
Certainly that’s what the funding data indicates, particularly at seed stage. Per Crunchbase data, investors have poured around $700 million so far this year into seed rounds for artificial intelligence companies with descriptions tied to autonomous agents. 1
Top funding recipients
Many of these rounds are on the large side, particularly by seed-stage standards.
To illustrate, we put together a list of 16 of the largest funding recipients, targeting sectors from drug discovery to construction to real estate sales to manufacturing.
The biggest seed-stage funding recipient hailed from the life science space: Lila Sciences, a startup that uses AI software to run experiments in automated labs. The Cambridge, Massachusetts, company publicly launched in March with a $200 million investment backed by Flagship Pioneering.
Others raised large rounds for tools automating aspects of desk work and everyday online drudgery. This includes Augment, developer of Augie, a self-described “AI teammate for shippers brokers and carriers,” as well as Yutori, which wants to develop “an AI chief-of-staff for everyone.”
Seed-stage companies are also attracting investors for tools and technologies aimed at helping enable the spread of automated agents. For instance, Jozu picked up $4 million last month to develop tools for AI model and agent orchestration, while Phonic closed on the same sum for a platform for building and evaluating voice AI agents.
Logical tasks first
Going forward, Rohan predicts the startups best poised for early success will be those focused on logical, factual matters, as this is where AI functions best. As a result, we’re seeing early applications gain traction in areas like legal tech and coding, where AI agents also benefit from plentiful, easily accessible data.
Of course, in the real world, many of our tasks and decisionmaking require a mix of logical and subjective considerations. As anyone who’s asked a chatbot for recommendations can attest, this is also an area where AI agents are quite willing to participate.
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Illustration: Dom Guzman
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