Applied Labs has raised $4.2 million in seed funding to develop advanced AI agents tailored to support and operations teams.
The funding round, led by Abstract with contributions from Point72 Ventures, Outlander, Tetra, and notable angel investors like Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch, Modal CTO Akshat Bubna, and ex-Twitter executive Ali Rowghani, brings Applied Labs’ total funding to $5.2 million.
Applied Labs specialises in creating AI-powered customer support agents fine-tuned to a business’s knowledge base, integrating first- and third-party systems to manage complex tasks. The company plans to expand its AI offerings into operations while maintaining a human-in-the-loop approach to ensure quality.
“For companies, there’s an explosion of C-Suite and boardroom interest into the question, what is our AI strategy?” said Michael Woo, CEO of Applied Labs. “The bottleneck isn’t the model anymore – LLM quality, speed and cost have reached an inflection point where almost every business can save time, cost and improve the quality of their support and ops. The challenge is in the data, tools and platform for teams to easily setup and perfect AI agents on their business-critical workflows. “
What are the key elements for success?
The company’s approach blends three critical elements to achieve better results. It offers omnichannel capabilities across chat, email, and phone that manage all customer interactions, as well as sophisticated orchestration of AI workflows and Q&A responses. Furthermore, it provides robust tools for monitoring, auditing, and testing AI outputs. In addition, by embedding guardrails and human intervention into the process, Applied Labs aims to avoid the pitfalls of poorly designed AI workflows, which can damage trust and amplify issues when scaled.
Woo, who previously led a 30-person team focused on operational scalability at Scale AI, and Waychal, an engineering leader with five AI patents, leverage their expertise to develop reliable and user-friendly AI agents. Additionally, their tools help non-technical teams address even the most challenging workflows without compromising quality or trust.
With plans to double its workforce in the coming months, Applied Labs envisions a future where businesses confidently deploy AI to handle their most intricate workflows, combining the speed of automation with the precision of human judgment to redefine operational excellence.