Scaled Cognition announced that it has raised $100 million in Series A funding led by Khosla Ventures.
The Mountain View-based AI model lab is focused on building reliable AI systems for enterprises. The company said its technology is already in production with Fortune 500 customers across financial services, healthcare, telecom, and insurance.
Scaled Cognition is focused on solving reliability issues that limit enterprise AI adoption, including mistakes and hallucinations in workflows where inaccurate answers can have serious consequences.
The company was co-founded by CTO Dan Klein, a UC Berkeley professor of AI and natural language processing researcher, and CEO Dan Roth. The two previously built and sold an agentic AI company to Microsoft.
Scaled Cognition plans to use the funding to expand its research team and accelerate enterprise deployments.
The company’s first flagship model is APT, or Agentic Pretrained Transformer. Scaled Cognition said APT provides conversational quality comparable to leading AI models while eliminating hallucinations and ensuring policy-adherent performance.
Scaled Cognition describes this capability as Super-Reliable Intelligence. The company said APT is smaller, faster, less expensive, and more accurate than frontier models.
APT is available for VPC and self-hosted deployment, giving enterprises control of their AI systems without ongoing dependence on third-party model providers.
The model is already being used for customer experience and service operations. Genesys, a cloud customer experience and AI-powered experience orchestration company serving more than 8,000 organizations across over 100 countries, uses APT within the Genesys Cloud platform for agentic virtual agent capabilities. Genesys has also invested in Scaled Cognition.
Scaled Cognition said companies using its models are on track to automate more than one billion customer service interactions over the next 12 months.
Beyond the model, Scaled Cognition has built a broader enterprise AI deployment platform that includes agentic tooling, simulation and evaluation frameworks, and live agent monitoring.
Customer experience is the company’s first application area. Scaled Cognition said the larger opportunity is the $600 billion business process outsourcing market, including customer service, IT support, HR, and finance.
KEY QUOTES:
“We spent years trying to apply AI to business applications and found it was essentially impossible to make these systems reliable. You could have an interaction that was spectacular, think the singularity is here, and then look at the data and discover the system was making grievous errors. The problem isn’t resources or effort, it’s architecture. Solving it took years of methodical work and more innovations than we can count.”
“When a system makes mistakes 30% of the time, complex issues go unresolved and customers don’t come back. With our models, most issues get fully resolved, resulting in hundreds of millions saved in operational costs, and customers who actually come away happier.”
Dan Roth, CEO and Co-Founder of Scaled Cognition
“We’ve made a series of breakthroughs that do for conversational AI what verifiable reinforcement learning has done for coding. Reliability is engineered into the architecture of our models, not bolted on after the fact. The biggest reliability challenge isn’t the mistakes that look wrong; it’s the ones that look completely correct. If you want AI to take real actions on behalf of customers, that’s the problem you have to solve.”
Dan Klein, CTO and Co-Founder of Scaled Cognition
“The way to quickly get into the market is to take a frontier model and put a layer on top. What Scaled Cognition did was develop a different approach, then combine it with the best of LLMs. That took more research and more developmental risk. Most people are too lazy to do that. The result is Super-Reliable Intelligence: a model that will not give you a wrong answer. In any industry where an agent takes a real action, nothing else counts.”
Vinod Khosla, Founding Partner of Khosla Ventures
