Only a number of years ago, considered one of the most well liked topics in enterprise software was ‘robotic process automation’ (RPA). It doesn’t feel like those services, which tried to automate lots of repetitive business processes, ever quite lived as much as their promise. The rise of generative AI, nonetheless, could be the missing key to constructing these sorts of systems.
Seattle-based Tektonic is considered one of the brand new startups on this space. The corporate, which mixes GenAI with more traditional symbolic methods, is coming out of stealth today and announcing its $10M seed funding round led by Point72 Ventures and Madrona Ventures.
The concept here is to permit users to work with GenAI agents through the use of natural language to create workflow automation. One area the corporate highlights is quotes and renewals, which regularly involve a series of manual tasks which can be hard to automate because every business has its own — and infrequently dynamic — processes for them.
Tektonic was co-founded by Nic Surpatanu, who previously held leadership roles at Tanium, UiPath and Microsoft. “Last yr, generative AI happened and I noticed that it unlocks some software scenarios that were not possible before,” Surpatanu said. “[Based on] what I learned at UiPath and Microsoft, I understand how far you may push traditional automation.”
What’s perhaps much more vital, he said, is that he believes you could’t treat generative AI as a magic box. “You’ve gotten to mix it with symbolic methods. You’ve gotten to mix it with more traditional software if you would like to squeeze the most effective out of it,” he said.
Generative AI, Surpatanu argues, can bring a level of adaptability to context and an understanding of the user’s intent to those systems that wasn’t really possible before and something that RPA often struggles with. With these older tools, any major change within the user interface will break the scripted automation. And when you create a set of automation, you then must commit to maintaining those.
AI also enables the extraction of semantic entities and their mapping to user intent.
“Our approach[…] is not going to make it 100% flexible for brief. I’m not claiming that. But I’m introducing enough flexibility to cover a much wider set of scenarios than was possible before,” Surpatanu said. He noted that he doesn’t consider that the present models are reliable enough to power fully autonomous agents yet and so humans will — no less than in the interim — remain within the loop. But, he also stressed, if a tool like Tektonic can take the present cutting-edge from automating 50% of a process to 80%, that itself can be a serious step forward.
On the technical side, Tektonic utilizes a mix of foundation models and open models for entity extraction and lower-level actions.
“As a substitute of doing manual work across multiple applications, sales reps should partner with AI-based agents that understand their processes and get things done so that they can spend more time working with customers,” Madrona’s Steve Singh, Ted Kummert and Palak Goel write within the firm’s announcement today. “The emergence of generative AI models with the power to reason across data silos inside applications and orchestrate tasks allow us to rethink process automation taking it to places it has never been before.”
Tektonic remains to be in its very early days and the team is currently working with quite a few design partners to check and construct out its system. “Fast forward, like three to 5 years from now, we’re going to be a SaaS company. You’re going to are available in and we’re going to hook up with the APIs in your systems,” Surpatanu said. For now, though, getting up and began with Tektonic takes installing the system as a container in a business’ virtual private cloud.
