Iterate.ai is a company that enables enterprise teams to build and run AI agents with confidence. The company’s platforms and applications are designed to deliver speed, security, and control from the first prompt to full-scale deployments. It has a global customer base and collaborates with some of the world’s largest companies across various industries, including retail, banking, and IT. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Iterate.ai co-founder Brian Sathianathan to gain a deeper understanding of the company.
Brian Sathianathan’s Background
Could you tell me more about your background? Sathianathan said:
“I started my career at Apple, where I was part of a small team in the Secret Products Group that developed the first iPhone. I hold patents related to that work. After Apple, I led architecture and innovation teams at both Samsung and Dell. Eventually, I teamed up with Jon Nordmark, who had previously built and sold eBags, to start Iterate.ai. Our goal was to help large enterprises embrace emerging technologies faster, especially around AI. I’m the CTO and co-founder, and I’ve led the development of our core platforms and applications, including Interplay, Generate, and AgentOne.”
Formation Of The Company
How did the idea for Iterate.ai come together? Sathianathan shared:
“Jon and I realized that traditional enterprises were struggling to keep pace with digital-native competitors. They had ideas, but lacked a systematic, low-risk way to build and test them quickly (especially in rapidly growing areas like AI and the IoT). We built Iterate to give those companies an innovation engine. We started with a low-code platform that I began developing during a destination wedding. Today, it powers some of the world’s leading AI applications in retail, finance, healthcare, and more.”
Favorite Memory
What has been your favorite memory working for Iterate so far? Sathianathan reflected:
“There have been many, but presenting live with Intel at CES a couple years ago was a high point. We showed off our voice LLM running entirely on-device (no cloud, no external dependencies). It was a huge technical milestone, and we were on stage again that same week with one of our longtime customers, Ulta Beauty, for a talk on the “limitless potential of AI everywhere.” That moment captured how far we’d come…from bootstrapping code in a hotel room to influencing how AI is built and deployed at the edge of the enterprise.”
Core Products
What are Iterate’s core products and features? Sathianathan explained:
“Our core platforms are Interplay and Generate. Interplay is a low-code AI orchestration layer that connects legacy systems, runs AI models, and builds agentic workflows without requiring teams to write custom code. It has hundreds of pre-built nodes and has been used by companies like Ulta and MUFG to rapidly create and scale AI apps.”
“Generate is our enterprise-grade AI assistant and agent platform. It runs locally on AI PCs, private servers, and air-gapped environments. Generate includes native retrieval-augmented generation (RAG), agent chaining, document analysis, and image understanding. It’s designed for industries where privacy, security, and infrastructure control aren’t optional.”
“On the application side, we’re also very excited about AgentOne, our advanced autonomous coding assistant for enterprise-grade codebases.”
Challenges Faced
Have you faced any challenges in your sector of work recently? Sathianathan acknowledged:
“One of the biggest challenges has been helping enterprises move from AI experiments to production systems, especially without exposing sensitive data to the public cloud. Many vendors still require customers to send information to shared GPU clusters. That’s simply a non-starter in industries like finance and healthcare. We overcame this by building platforms that run fully on local infrastructure (so no GPU dependency, no third-party exposure). It wasn’t easy, but it gave us a real competitive edge and built trust with our customers.”
Evolution Of The Company’s Technology
How has Iterate’s technology evolved since launching? Sathianathan noted:
“We’ve gone from enabling rapid prototyping to powering enterprise-scale deployments. Our early focus was low-code and modular design, and we still believe in that. But we’ve layered in support for secure agents, persistent memory, and multimodal workflows. Generate has matured into a powerful orchestration environment for AI agents that can take action, not just respond. We’ve also optimized everything from chip-level inference to LLM-agnostic memory management so our tools work anywhere, from AI PCs to bare metal servers.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of Iterate’s most significant milestones? Sathianathan cited:
“We recently raised $6.4 million in strategic funding from Auxier Asset Management and a group of retail tech veterans who previously worked with Jon at eBags. That vote of confidence was important. But before that we’d purposely grown from our profits while taking what amounted to a small angel round in our first decade. We even scaled to over $10 million in revenue without a formal sales team or marketing hire.”
“Another big recent milestone is our recent partnership with Intel to ship Generate pre-bundled on their Meteor Lake and Lunar Lake AI PCs, which are projected to hit over 100 million devices. We also launched AIcurate, our turnkey on-prem appliance, with ASA Computers and Pure Storage. And we’ve had meaningful traction with global brands across finance, retail, and CPG who now use our technology to deploy AI securely and at scale.”
Customer Success Stories
When asking Sathianathan about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“Ulta Beauty is a great example. They’re one of the largest beauty retailers in the U.S., and their very smart digital innovation team has trusted Iterate for years. They use our platform to build customer-facing tools and internal automations, including AI-powered assistants. They’ve been able to roll out new AI applications much faster than their competitor, and that trust and velocity are what we strive to offer every customer.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Sathianathan assessed:
“We’re operating at the intersection of enterprise generative AI, secure on-prem deployment, and local-first agent orchestration. That spans everything from retail and healthcare to finance and manufacturing. IDC estimates the enterprise AI market will exceed $400 billion by 2027, and we believe the privacy-first, cloud-optional slice of that will become one of the fastest-growing segments. Our goal is to own that space.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates Iterate from its competition? Sathianathan affirmed:
“We’ve had ‘AI’ in our name since 2013; this isn’t new to us! While most companies are still figuring out how to bolt AI onto their stack, we built ours from day one with modularity, local-first deployment, and privacy in mind.”
“One thing that really sets us apart is secure agent orchestration. Our agents run inside the customer’s environment, with full control over memory, permissions, and behavior. There’s no shared GPU, no external inference, no compromise on data security. Unlike black-box APIs, our tools are transparent, extensible, and customizable.”
Future Goals
What are some of Iterate’s future goals? Sathianathan emphasized:
“We’re staying ahead of what enterprises need from AI, which means not just faster answers, but smarter decisions, greater security, and easier deployment. We’re continuing to scale Generate as a platform for building secure, autonomous AI agents. We’ll deepen our partnerships with companies like Intel, Pure Storage, and TD SYNNEX, and expand across industries where AI risk tolerance is low, but demand is high. We’re also exploring new ways to embed AI directly into enterprise workflows, without adding risk, complexity, or latency.”
Additional Thoughts
Any other topics you would like to discuss? Sathianathan concluded:
“One viewpoint we hold is that AI agents aren’t chatbots, they’re digital employees. They act, they remember, and they evolve. That’s powerful, yes, but only if you build them securely. Most AI tools today run on shared infrastructure and accumulate memory in ways that are hard to monitor, audit, or control. We architect our agents to be trustworthy from the start: private by default, governed by design, and optimized to run where the data lives. That’s the future Iterate is building toward.”
