Many companies are already using AI production tools, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT, which can help improve employee performance by up to 40% compared to non-users. However, only businesses with large engineering teams can build their own AI workforce. An Australian-based startup, AI relevancewants to help companies of all sizes build custom AI agents for any use case or function to maximize productivity with its SaaS-based low-code platform.
“Our mission is to enable teams to be limited only by their ideas, not their size — from the seasoned industry player to the ambitious newcomer,” said Relevance AI co-founder Daniel Vassilev. “We’re removing complexity and enabling AI agents to work autonomously and complete detailed workflows or perform complex tasks with accuracy and predictability that companies can trust.”
The startup said it had raised $10 million (AUD$15 million) in a Series A funding round led by King River Capital with participation from global investors Peak XV’s Surge, Galileo Venture and previous investor Insight Partners. Relevance AI will use the new capital, which brings its total raising to $13.2 million, for its low-code platform that allows companies to build and deploy custom AI agents to automate repetitive tasks.
Relevance AI claims that around 6,000 companies have signed up with Relevance AI in the past three months alone, performing more than 250,000 tasks, such as answering customer queries, managing outbound sales or conducting market research. The company says it now works with some of the biggest household names in technology, retail and fast-moving consumer goods.
“From a market perspective, we start by focusing on two verticals, like sales and support teams, as they tend to be text-based and have a significant ROI,” Vassilev told TechCrunch. .
It released two products that customers use today: AI Tools and AI agents. Users can plug and play in their existing workflows to automate repetitive tasks with the startup’s AI Tools and complete entire workflows from research to marketing to sales with Relevance’s AI agents. The latest AI agent, the business development agent (BDR), helps sales teams spend more time on sales calls and less time managing inboxes, then answering key questions. According to Vassilev, Relevance AI is attracting customers for now.
The company believes that “every team will have hired at least one AI agent by 2025, and by 2030 will have a full AI team supporting them.”
Image Credits: AI relevance
Relevance’s target customers are companies and teams that want to work iteratively on autopilot with a trusted AI partner, Vassilev told TechCrunch. “Unlike a typical conversational interface for chatting with an assistant, Relevance AI focuses on task-based results with task assignment experience rather than individual conversations,” Vassilev said.
Many applications could benefit from automating repetitive tasks with Relevance’s platform, Vassilev continued. For example, product managers can use agents to help produce specifications and research or engineers to help with code reviews. The startup is already experimenting with more multi-use cases involving video and audio.
Vassilev, Jacky Koh and Daniel Palmer founded Relevance AI in 2020. It has 19 staff, aiming to be around 30 by mid-2024. Plans are to scale its team and expand its presence in the US with an office in San Francisco next year.
