Thread AI Inc., a startup that helps organizations automate business tasks using artificial intelligence, has raised $20 million in funding.
The company announced the Series A round on Thursday. It was led by Greycroft with participation from Scale Venture Partners, Plug-and-Play, Meritech Capital and Homebrew. Index Ventures, the largest investor in Thread AI’s previous round, participated as well.
Thread AI was launched last year by former Palantir Technologies Inc. employees Mayada Gonimah (pictured, left) and Angela McNeal (right). It offers a platform called Lemma that can automate complex, multistep tasks such as finding the root cause of equipment failures. A drag-and-drop interface allows customers to assemble automation workflows from pre-packaged software components. It’s touted as a simpler alternative to the existing automation technologies on the market.
“Companies today face a frustrating dilemma when implementing AI, either settle for rigid, prebuilt applications that force them to fit their business logic into a predefined structure, or invest heavily in talent, infrastructure and engineering resources to build custom AI workflows from scratch,” McNeal said.
Thread AI’s platform is based on an open-source technology called Serverless Workflow, or SWF. It’s a programming language geared toward creating task automation workflows. SWF includes reliability features that allow workflows to automatically recover from certain types of technical issues. It also has a relatively simple syntax designed to ease development.
Thread AI’s platform uses an upgraded version of SWF with additional features. The company has added enhancements that make it easier to integrate AI models into automation workflows. Additionally, those AI models can leverage external applications such as databases to process user requests.
Troubleshooting hardware malfunctions is one of the tasks that Thread AI promises to ease for customers. Using the platform, a manufacturer could create an automation workflow that collects data from equipment sensors, spots error alerts and uses AI to try to fix the issue. The workflow could also be configured to notify technicians when an error can’t be resolved automatically.
In addition to textual data such as sensor logs, Lemma can ingest multimodal inputs. It could, for example, enrich equipment failure alerts with footage from production line cameras. The platform automatically encrypts the files that it ingests and removes sensitive data to reduce the risk of a breach.
Thread AI also provides other cybersecurity features. According to the company, its custom SWF implementation includes authentication features not included in the original version. There’s also an automatic vulnerability scanning mechanism that helps enterprises spot weak points in their infrastructure.
The company says its platform has helped customers speed up some business processes by 70%. To expand product adoption, the company will invest its new funding round in growing its commercial team.
Photo: Index Ventures
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