Individuals may work closely with AI agents as they become increasingly prevalent in the workplace. According to a report by Boston Consulting Group, the market for AI agents is expected to grow at a 45% compound annual growth rate over the next five years.
Just like human employees, AI agents could be onboarded to learn various roles, access company information and business contexts, and integrate into workflows. In addition, unlike traditional automation tools, AI agents have the potential to constantly adapt and improve their operations.
Relevance AI, a San Francisco- and Sydney-based startup developing an AI agent “operating system” to enable businesses to build teams of AI agents, has raised $24 million in Series B funding led by Bessemer Venture Partners. Returning investors King River Capital, Insight Partners, and Peak XV also participated, bringing Relevance’s total raised to $37 million. The company did not provide its valuation.
The fundraising comes about a year and a half after the startup closed its Series A. Relevance says that it has experienced rapid growth, with 40,000 AI agents registered on its platform.
Customers include Qualified, Activision, and Safety Culture.
Relevance has to compete with players in the AI agent space like Retell, Qeen.ai, SmythOS, Gooey.AI, Cykel AI, and Microsoft. The five-year-old company sees agent builder platforms, vertical agent software, and agent engineering frameworks as its competition, according to co-CEO and co-founder Daniel Vassilev.
“[W]e’ve even seen incumbents like Salesforce make a big bet on the value of agents,” Vassilev told TechCrunch in an interview. “[Relevance] enable[s] training the agent to really specialize in the niche workflows of their organization. We’re also tool- and model-agnostic, allowing our customers to leverage their entire tech stack across their entire business rather than just a single vendor’s ecosystem.”
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Relevance says that it’ll use its new funding to further enhance the product capabilities of its AI agents and provide support to customers in its primary markets of Australia and the U.S. Vassilev has relocated to San Francisco to open Relevance’s office and build up its go-to-market team there. The company says it has 80 people across its San Francisco and Sydney offices today, up from 19 employees in 2023.
Coinciding with its Series B funding, Relevance is introducing two new features on its platform. “Workforce” is a no-code multi-agent system designed to help non-technical professionals and engineers build specialized teams of agents to collaborate like human employees, completing complex processes from start to finish. “Invent” is a tool that lets users create AI agents using text prompts.