Just a few years ago, one of the hottest topics in enterprise software was “robotic process automation” (RPA). It doesn’t appear that these services, which have attempted to automate many repetitive business processes, have not fully lived up to their promise. The rise of genetic artificial intelligence, however, may just be the missing key to building these kinds of systems.
based in Seattle Freemasonry is one of the new startups in this space. The company, which combines GenAI with more traditional token methods, is coming out of stealth today to announce a $10 million funding round led by Point72 Ventures and Madrona Ventures.
The idea here is to allow users to collaborate with GenAI agents using natural language to create workflow automation. One area the company points to is offers and renewals, which often involve a number of manual tasks that are difficult to automate because each business has its own — and often dynamic — processes for them.
Tektonic was founded by Nic Surpatanu, who previously held leadership roles at Tanium, UiPath and Microsoft. “Last year, genetic AI happened and I realized that it unlocks some software scenarios that were impossible before,” Surpatanu said. “[Based on] what I learned at UiPath and at Microsoft, I know how far you can push traditional automation.”
What’s perhaps even more important, he said, is that he believes you can’t treat genetic AI as a magic box. “You have to combine it with symbolic methods. You have to combine it with more traditional software if you want to get the best out of it,” he said.
Generative AI, Surpatanu argues, can bring a degree of contextual adaptability and understanding of user intent to these systems that wasn’t really possible before, and something that RPA often struggles with. With these older tools, any major change to the user interface will break the bound automation. And once you create a set of automations, you must then commit to maintaining them.
Artificial intelligence also enables semantic entities to be extracted and matched to user intent.
“Our approach[…] won’t make it 100% flexible for brevity. I don’t claim that. But I am introducing enough flexibility to cover a much wider set of scenarios than was possible before,” Surpatanu said. He noted that he doesn’t think current models are reliable enough to power fully autonomous agents even so humans will — at least for now — stay in the loop. But, he also stressed, if a tool like Tektonic can take the current state of the art from automating 50% of a process to 80%, that in itself would be a significant step forward.
On the technical side, Tektonic uses a combination of foundational and open models for entity extraction and lower-level actions.
“Instead of doing manual work across multiple apps, sales reps should work with AI-based agents that understand their processes and get things done so they can spend more time working with customers,” writes Steve Singh , Ted Kummert and Palak Goel of Madrona. company announcement today. “The emergence of artificial intelligence models built with the ability to reason across data silos within applications and orchestrate tasks allows us to rethink process automation by taking it to places it’s never been before.”
Tektonic is still in its early days, and the team is currently working with several design partners to test and build their system. “Fast forward, three to five years from now, we will be a SaaS company. You’ll come in and we’ll connect to the APIs in your systems,” Surpatanu said. For now, however, getting started with Tektonic requires you to install the system as a container on a company’s virtual private cloud.
