Arcade collects $ 12 million from the new Co-founder fund for perplexity to make agents of the less horrible AI

Arcade, an AI agent infrastructure startup founded by former Okta Alex Salazar leader and the former Redis Sam Parte engineer, raised $ 12 million from Laude Ventures.

Laude is the new fund launched in 2024 by Co-founder of perplexity Andy Konwinski, IT UC Berkeley who also co-founded with data.

This is not the only check that Laude cut. But this is the first announced publicly, told Techcrunch, co-founder and general partner of Laude, Pete Sonini. Sonsini is well known for his years in Nea, where he led the first investments in Databricks, Anyscale and Perplexity.

As for Salazar, he is a repeated founder. He landed in Okta after Sell ​​your Authentication API Startup, Stormpath, to the company In 2017. He spent the coming years in Okta as VP construction products. Partee, for its part, had built applications based on LLM and contributed to certain open source projects such as Langchain and Llamaindex, according to Arcade.

When Salazar saw the beginnings of Chatgpt 3.5, he saw the future and his next start -up idea: an AI agent company. Arcade was founded in February 2024.

Then he and left quickly discovered that AI agents do not really work.

“We were trying to build a site reliability of the site that was going to compete with [companies] Like Data Dog, ”said Salazar. But “most agents are zero. They don’t do much.

Salazar and Parte continued to “fight our head against the wall” trying to get their agent just to connect to other services and get the data necessary to do their job.

One of the reasons, they have discovered, is that many agents use LLM formed on public data, but not private data. They can therefore, for example, talk about the features of the product, but cannot confirm that an order has been delivered.

The pair decided that Carte would do for AI agents what Okta once Upon-A-Time did for the SaaS cloud services. The founders have built a tool call platform for their site reliability agent.

“People were very surprised when we show them the demo of this agent. They were not as interested in the agent himself,” said Salazar. They wanted to know how they made the agent work.

“In the end, we just looked at each other and said … Why didn’t we just stop with the agent and sell the underlying tool call platform?” Salazar said.

Enter Arcade, which helps each agent access with the same privileges to the same applications and data as the worker he assists or the role of work he plays. Arcade is available via prices or subscriptions based on use.

Arcade fits into Oauth, it can therefore manage the authentications of thousands of services and SaaS websites. It also acts an intermediary, providing secure tokens management which prevents the LLM themselves from accessing this identification information, said Salazar.

When Sonsini, who had supported Salazar with Stormath, heard that the founder was doing a new startup, he stretched his hand and wanted to enter.

“We are very, very concentrated on the founders of technical types, and we are therefore very trendy with the research community. We have limited partners who are researchers, ”said Sonini.

While many founders of Startup in AI focus on “the brilliant object” around LLM, such as agents, “my experience is the lower levels, the infrastructure where companies of a billion dollars can be built,” said Sonsini. And arcade “falls into this space”.