SuperAGI Raises $10 Million from Jan Koum’s Newlands VC for AGI Development
In an ambitious move towards developing a full-stack Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) system, SuperAGI has announced a substantial Series A funding round of $10 million led by Newlands VC, a venture capital firm backed by WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum. SuperAGI’s vision revolves around creating Advanced Large Agentic Models (LAMs), a cutting-edge evolution of Large Language Models (LLMs) designed to perform a broader array of tasks reliably.
The funding arrives as SuperAGI garners significant attention, with over 20,000 developers from prestigious companies like Microsoft, Google, Tencent, Tesla, JP Morgan Chase, and OpenAI actively engaging with its platform. The Palo Alto and Bengaluru-based startup seeks to leverage this financial backing to advance research and development on middleware and software applications, pushing AI technology towards greater use case versatility.
In an exclusive interview, Ishaan Bhola, Co-founder and CEO of SuperAGI, shared insights into the limitations of conventional LLMs in action-based tasks and how SuperAGI aims to address these gaps through its innovative agentic frameworks. Despite the burgeoning interest in agentic models, Bhola notes the absence of effective solutions in the market, a challenge SuperAGI is set on overcoming.
Although AI investments have seen a downturn recently, the interest in generative AI technologies remains strong, with tech giants like Microsoft and Google’s parent company, Alphabet, continuing to invest in AI startups. PitchBook’s latest data reveal a 19% decrease in deal numbers from 2022 to 2023, yet investments in AI startups amassed a significant $22.3 billion in Q4 2023 alone.
Newlands VC, operating clandestinely out of Dallas, Texas under the stewardship of former Sequoia partner Michael Abramson, has ventured into AI startup funding with SuperAGI after previously focusing on large public tech company investments and enterprise startups. The move signals Newlands VC’s expanding interest in the AI sector.
SuperAGI’s journey began with a focus on agentic research and creating autonomous agents. Its flagship product, Contlo, is designed for comprehensive marketing automation, enabling businesses to manage campaigns across various channels through a unified platform. Following Contlo’s success, SuperAGI introduced Verk, an AI tool aimed at functioning as an AI employee for sales, design, market research, and social media management, among other roles.
The company takes pride in its open-source approach, having shared its infrastructure, including LAMs, the autonomous agents framework, and training datasets. This strategy has attracted the attention of industry giants and facilitated the construction of diverse applications within SuperAGI’s community of over 20,000 members.
Among SuperAGI’s notable innovations are SAM-7B, a compact agentic model boasting exceptional performance in reasoning benchmarks, and VEagle, a vision model excelling in textual understanding and image interpretation. These developments underscore SuperAGI’s commitment to efficiency and effectiveness in AI research.
Bhola emphasizes that SuperAGI transcends traditional API-reliant agentic models by enabling direct action without third-party interventions, pointing towards a future where AI can perform an increasing array of tasks independently.
With this new funding, SuperAGI aims to expand its offerings, including the launch of the Verk Store, an AI employee marketplace, and collaborations with companies like EY to develop tailor-made AI solutions for small and medium enterprises. Ambitiously aiming to rank among the top three AI research firms globally by 2024, SuperAGI is steadfast in its mission to contribute to the AGI domain while maintaining an open-source philosophy, distinguishing itself from competitors that have gradually transitioned to a closed-source model.
As SuperAGI continues to grow, attracting notable investors and collaborators, its journey exemplifies the vibrant dynamism and potential of the AI sector, offering a glimpse into the future of technology where AI’s capabilities are limited only by imagination.
