Introducing the AI Camp: Agents Cohort
In December 2023 we announced the theme of the 10th Camp program at Betaworks: Agents. This theme choice was based on our belief that agents are a critical part of the AI ecosystem and could well become the catch-all term for natively AI software. There is so much innovation happening in this space — some at the app layer and a lot in middleware.
Out of the more than 250 companies that applied, we picked nine teams, each of which have formed a unique insight about agents and agentic AI, and are taking a differentiated approach to solving massive problems. The cohort we assembled is a distinct mix of infrastructure/tooling and application-layer products, with founders from the US, Europe, and Canada. While some of the products are built specifically for developers, others are targeted at the enterprise, and others at prosumers.
Besides helping them build their products, their GTM and preparing for launch, design partners and customers or investors, Camp is an opportunity for us to spend 13 weeks working really closely with these teams and further develop our thesis around the technologies they are using.
At Betaworks, we use a general framework to help us think about emerging tech, which tend to follow the this pattern of development:
- First wave: replicating existing workflows
- Second wave: augmentation
- Third wave: truly native experiences
Our experience with this Camp cohort confirms that Agents represent this third wave of AI development. To that end, we think “agents” will become the overarching term for native AI software in the same way that “apps” became the term for native mobile software. Not only do agents represent AI-native software, but there is the potential for agents to actually be the majority of software in the future, not just a subset of software. In other words, we think agents are going to eat software alive.
You don’t have to take our word for it. Come see for yourself: Camp culminates in Demo Day on Tuesday May 7th at Betaworks in NYC. This is an opportunity to hear the story behind each product and see them in action with live demos.
Read more about each team below, and let us know here if you are interested in attending Demo Day in person at Betaworks.
Twin Labs
Seamlessly delegate repetitive tasks to an AI trained to autonomously control any tool.
Twin Labs is building apps and models to enable knowledge workers to assign repetitive tasks to an AI with the same ease as delegating to a smart intern. Users create “Flows,” natural language descriptions of tasks to run or automate. Twin’s custom action model translates them into the right sequence of actions to execute. Finally, these actions are executed autonomously through its headless browser, which can control and navigate within any application. Twin targets teams (HR, Sales, Finance, Ops, Back-Office) in SMBs struggling to keep up with growth, and looking to automate their repetitive work. Their business model is usage-based.
Hugo Mercier (CEO) was previously the founder and CEO of Dreem ($60m raised, 150 employees, exited). Joao Justi (CTO) is the co-founder of Videosupport (acquired in April 2023) where he led both the ML engine and core product engineering.
Jsonify
Turn webpages and documents into useful structured data automatically
Jsonify has built smart AI agents that can discover, monitor and extract data from websites and documents, using advanced computer vision models to look at the page and understand structure in the same way that a human does. In other words, it can turn messy websites and documents into sensible structured JSON or CSV data, in seconds — with no human intervention! Jsonify’s customers are tech startups who want to build on top of the AI stack/API, and non-technical businesses who have data needs and don’t want to maintain or build data pipelines themselves. The product has a tiered pricing model (based on the number of run tasks run), including a freemium level.
Founder Paul Hunkin has been working in generative AI agents since 2022, has 15+ years of experience in software development, is a 3x previous co-founder/CTO (Quacks.ai, Apellix, ButlerTech), and has worked with Google, NASA, and Sony.
Resolvd AI
Resolvd empowers engineering teams to automate repetitive cloud workflows using AI-powered agents, enabling them to focus on innovation and high-impact work.
Engineering teams are increasingly burdened with maintaining microservice-based cloud infrastructure, diverting their focus from core product development and innovation. Resolvd’s desktop application allows users to effortlessly capture their cloud-related workflows via screen recordings, automatically generating step-by-step documentation and automating those workflows through a powerful CLI/Browser engine. Resolvd is targeting (a) engineering and product teams looking to offload time-consuming cloud-related tasks; (b) engineers who need a more efficient way to manage their workflows; and (c) infrastructure and IT teams that want to reduce bottlenecks and dependencies. Resolvd operates on a freemium, seat-based SaaS model. Individual engineers can build and automate their cloud workflows for free, while enterprises can then upgrade to access advanced features such as collaboration, custom integrations, and secure VPC deployments.
Founder Ananth Manivannan spent three years as a backend software engineer at Capital One during a transformative time in the company, shifting from monolithic, on-prem servers to 100% microservice, cloud-based architecture. This changed how engineering teams worked, and he started building automated tooling to help with these new cloud/infra related workflows.
Floode
Floode is a personalized AI executive assistant that automates routine communication management.
We waste time scrolling through our email inboxes every 15 minutes to identify the 1% of critical information amidst 99% of irrelevant data. To address this issue, Floode is replacing the outdated inbox with a highly personalized AI executive assistant tailored to each user’s needs. Through seamless collaboration with the user, the Floode AI assistant can determine the next steps for each incoming email before processing the information. Floode is currently available as a web app and will be released on mobile by the end of the year.
The Floode AI executive assistant is available starting at $30/month or $300/year. The target customers are executives in tech, especially startup CEOs who lose precious hours juggling hundreds of emails. In the long term, Floode aims to provide an AI executive assistant to anyone communicating online for professional purposes.
Sarah Allali (CEO), formerly at Airbnb, has a background in Cognitive Science and Human-Computer Interaction. Nicolas Cabrignac (CTO) specializes in AI/ML and Human-Computer Interaction. In 2019, they co-founded Moone, one of the first GPT-3 powered AI assistants for managers.
Extensible AI
Capture regressions in your agents before and after deploying to production.
The LLM, agent logic, and the environment an agent operates in are all subject to change. With so many variables in flux, reliably measuring an agent’s reliability in production and staging can be challenging. Companies are left in the dark about whether their deployed agents are regressing or meeting performance expectations. Currently, agents are manually tested which leaves gaping holes in coverage, leading to embarrassing and trust-eroding situations when untested, and even tested, scenarios go haywire in production. Extensible is building a commercially-usable logging tool for agents (completely free and open-source) as well as a plug-and-play reliability tool on top of it.
Extensible provides high-quality, production-ready, fully open-source tools, helping enterprises set up custom at-scale logging infra at cost. Their target customers are AI Agent companies working on deploying agents to production.
Co-founders Parth and Omkaar bring a unique background of Product, ML, and Distributed Systems to the applied ML Agent space. Parth Sareen (CEO) is finishing up Mechatronics Engineering @ UWaterloo. Former roles include: Distributed Systems Engineer at Autodesk, and internships at Apple, Tesla, Deloitte. Omkaar Kamath (CTO) studies Management Engineering @ UWaterloo. He built an early version of an “agent” while interning at Autodesk (back in 2021, before LLM agents were a thing) to conduct competitor research on a recurring basis for a fraction of the cost. Former internships include Majik Systems and Carta.
Skej
Your New AI Scheduling Assistant
Scheduling the 1+ billion meetings that occur every year is a laborious, time consuming task that kills productivity and is notoriously hard to automate. Enter Skej: a dynamic AI agent that seamlessly handles all back and forth scheduling communications and calendar bookings.
Simply copy Skej in an email, DM, or Slack/Teams conversation and watch it take over the entire scheduling process. Skej simulates the actions of a great executive assistant, and it’s compatible with any existing calendar tool. Skej offers a free tier and a paid subscription where users can unlock premium features and advanced scheduling tools.
Founders (and brothers) Paul and Justin Canetti have built and scaled multiple companies including MAZ Systems (no-code app development platform acquired by PSG Equity) and Bounce House (scheduling platform acquired by Declare Health).
Opponent
Adversarial agents capable of deep play with children.
Attention is essential to healthy development in children. Parents spend time and money to ensure their kids receive quality attention — school, activities, playdates — but what about all the ambient time in between? Today parents are atomized and turn more and more to on-demand digital media. Opponent Systems is building a new kind of attention-giving agent to augment family life. Our first product is a digital dragon you can facetime/video call like an extended family member. It incorporates a new architecture for graduating memories into cognitive maps (from made-up games to common sense), and a System 2-inspired faculty for applying those maps to the play at hand. Target customers are the divided parent, the only child, the atomized family.
Founder Ian Cheng previously worked as an artist making multi-agent simulations presented at MoMA, Whitney, MOCA, Serpentine, M Plus, Tate, Leeum, De Young, Venice Biennale. BA Cognitive Science, UC Berkeley.
High Dimensional Research (HDR)
A full stack framework for developers, whether hobbyist or professional, to understand, develop, and deploy agentic applications or online-enabled agents.
Building agentic applications is hard and even the state of the art is unreliable. HDR has developed a batteries-included framework for launching web agents. At the core of this framework is the Collective Memory Index, which transmits information between models to enable any LLM to execute tasks reliably. HDR sells credits on a per use basis. Their target customers are AI developers at all team sizes and levels of technical ability with additional utilities for enterprises.
Tynan (Ty) Daly (CTO) has spent his career in ML across a variety of industries, including training and deploying standard, exotic, and original transformer architectures. Matilde Park (CPO) has spent her career leading teams building video games and peer-to-peer application spaces. Gates Torrey (CEO) has spent his career investing across a variety of asset classes and stages, with a focus on transformative technologies and novel assets.
Mbodi
Enabling internet scale learning in robotics
The fundamental problem for ML in robotics is data scarcity. Mbodi’s tools uniquely provide cross-embodiment dataset transfer learning with generative AI. The current alternatives are spending tens of millions on tele-operation and hardware or paying Nvidia Monopoly money for their omniverse.
Mbodi’s target customers are any company or research lab with a robot. Initial targets are the open source enthusiasts like Meta, research labs, and startups as well as service robot companies. Mbodi will provide their unique, cross-embodiment end-to-end learning framework as an open-source alternative to extensive tele-operation and ecosystem lock-in as encountered with Nvidia. Simultaneously, they will charge per token for hosting and servicing multimodal generative AI features for robotics such as inference-time planning, dreaming (training on generated sensor data), a dashboard for observing catastrophic forgetting, and high performance low latency inference endpoints.
Co-founder Sebastian Peralta is a roboticist, AI researcher, and previous network latency minimizer at Google’s public DNS. Co-founder Xavier (Tianhao) Chi was previously a tech lead at Google with extensive technical and product experience.
About Camp
Camp is a thematic investment and in-residence program for startups building in frontier technologies. Betaworks has been investing in AI and machine learning since 2016 — we wrote the first check into HuggingFace as a part of BotCamp. For each cohort, we select 8–10 companies building within a theme to participate in a 13-week program.
For this cohort, each company received $500K in investment from Betaworks and our syndication partners. Participants receive 1:1 mentorship, tailored programming, introductions to investors, and product development-focused guidance. Teams have access to the Betaworks office and event space, and the program culminates in an IRL Demo Day here in New York City.
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