Meta Vets’ Startup Yutori Raises $15 Million for AI Assistants

Yutori, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup founded by Meta veterans, has raised $15 million.

The new funding round, announced Thursday (March 27), accompanies the company’s emergence from stealth and will help Yutori develop personalized AI assistants that it says can automate day-to-day tasks.

“Today’s frontier AI models enable great chatbots but can’t complete tasks autonomously,” the company said in a news release. “Yutori was founded to build personal AI assistants that are so reliable that they become the primary drivers of action on the web.”

According to the release, these assistants will handle things like scheduling and communications as well as authentication and transactions, “creating a world where everyone has access to a team of digital assistants.”

But to get to this point, the company said, a new approach is needed, as current agentic applications built around large language models (LLMs) can “propagate errors over long sequences of actions involved in complex tasks.” To make LLMs effective at carrying out tasks, Yutori says it is developing an agent-first approach.

“When you’re reimagining, from scratch, the interface between consumers and the web — you can’t be focused just on the AI models or just on the orchestration or application layers,” said Abhishek Das, co-CEO and co-founder.

“To raise both the floor and ceiling of human productivity on the web, you need to innovate across the stack in a coherent and tightly coupled way.”

Das is joined by friends and fellow AI researchers Devi Parikh and Dhruv Batra, both veterans of Meta. The company says its three co-founders have a combined 50 years of experience in the AI field.

The company’s launch comes in the middle of an “AI gold rush,” as PYMNTS wrote earlier this month, with firms charging increasing amounts for artificial intelligence features as the cost of running the technology grows.

“As artificial intelligence transforms from a cool experiment to an essential business tool, we’re witnessing a gold rush mentality in pricing,” that report said. “While there are legitimate costs behind developing and running these systems, the current prices seem to include a healthy dose of ‘what the market will bear’ thinking.”

However, considering that, per PYMNTS Intelligence data, the same market is beginning to report positive returns on investments (ROI) on its GenAI spending, it might also be willing to bear the higher costs.

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