New York and Tel Aviv-based Augmented Intelligence Inc. (AUI) has raised $20 million in a small bridge SAFE round with a valuation capped at $750 million. The round was completed in about a week and brings the startup’s funding to date to about $60 million.
This follows a $10 million raise at a capped valuation of $350 million in September 2024, when AUI announced a go-to-market partnership with Google, and comes ahead of a “major announcement” regarding broader funding promised later this year.
AUI’s core proposition is Apollo-1, developed over the past eight years by the company’s founders Ohad Eluelo and Ori Cohen, which they hail as the world’s first neurosemiotic foundation model for task-oriented conversational AI.
“Apollo-1 enables developers and enterprises to design policy-compliant agents that perform complex procedures reliably, transparently, and with control,” the company said.
Despite the rise of large-scale language models (LLMs) in recent years, AUI believes that the ability to fluently perform tasks such as reservations, payments, cancellations, and registrations in a deterministic and policy-compliant manner is “the missing half of conversational AI.”
“There’s a reason everyone knows the names ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini,” CEO Elhelo said in a press release. “However, there are still few examples of large enterprises successfully deploying reliable conversational agents at scale. LLM-based agents work well for open conversations, but are not reliable enough for full-scale task-oriented deployments.”
The startup believes Apollo 1 will change this. Rather than being extensively pre-trained as in traditional deep learning products, procedural knowledge is directly encoded and uses neural models for perception, language understanding, and production.
This is said to provide the operational certainty that businesses require, which is particularly important for businesses in the regulated sector and is particularly suited for B2B applications.
However, it is not designed to act as an agent itself, but rather to allow organizations to build their own agents. It is also domain agnostic, so it can be applied to multiple sectors such as travel, insurance, and healthcare.
Supporters of AUI do believe it has great potential, with Chris Varelas, co-founder of early investor Redwood Capital, saying, “We’ve seen some of today’s top AI leaders walk away with their heads spinning after interacting with Apollo 1.”
It is currently being rolled out in beta to Fortune 500 companies, and AUI says general availability will be announced separately, likely by the end of the year.
