Sema4.ai aims to build intelligent agents that transform how knowledge workers collaborate with AI. Led by open-source pioneers and fueled by $30.5 million from investors, including Benchmark, Mayfield, and Canvas Ventures, Sema4.ai is ready to become the leader in the $88 billion autonomous agent market.
The company also announced the acquisition of open source automation innovator Robocorp, accelerating their position to build, run, and manage intelligent agents for the enterprise.
For the world’s billion knowledge workers, this promise of AI has yet to be realized. And Large Language Models (LLMs) can summarize vast amounts of information and converse with humans but struggle to support and streamline the complex end-to-end workflows of knowledge workers.
Existing enterprise automation solutions are limited to simple, repetitive, and point-to-point tasks because they lack the fundamental competencies for knowledge work like the intelligence and reasoning to manage ambiguity, and the ability to adapt to changing enterprise context and take real-time action.
Sema4.ai enables meaningful human-AI collaboration while supporting and streamlining the complex decision-making of knowledge workers. Customers can now utilize the power of LLMs safely and securely across their most mission-critical workflows, moving from low-level and low-value automation to native, ground-up, and AI-based agents.
Sema4.ai’s founding team is made up of industry leaders Rob Bearden, Ram Venkatesh, Suds Menon, and Paul Codding, with deep expertise and decades of experience spanning data management, distributed systems, application development, and open source from companies like Cloudera, Docker, Hortonworks, SpringSource, and JBoss. Through this acquisition, Robocorp founder and CEO Antti Karjalainen joins the founding team, adding further depth of experience in open source and automation.
Sema4.ai also announced a community release of a new AI Actions framework that integrates directly with LangChain and OpenAI. And with Sema4.ai’s Python-based AI Actions framework, teams can create intelligent agents that act against their enterprise systems using LLMs. Plus, intelligent agents transform LLMs from information processors to active participants in enterprise systems, enabling completely new and practical use cases for Generative AI.
KEY QUOTES:
“Our founders each have a proven track record of building significant enterprise software businesses. Our acquisition of Robocorp was borne out of a deep conviction that intelligence without action is incomplete, and action without intelligence is, at best, non-strategic. Together, we’re well-positioned to build category-defining intelligent agents that connect context to action, changing how work gets done in the enterprise.”
– Rob Bearden, CEO of Sema4.ai
“Benchmark’s relationship with Rob Bearden has spanned 20+ years of open source success stories with over $2 billion in current product revenue — from JBoss to, more recently, Cloudera. The pillars of his leadership, open source AI, and the agent technology of Robocorp will allow major enterprises to safely build, run, and manage paradigm-shifting AI applications, with the potency of an open source foundation that will only grow in strength with time.”
– Peter Fenton, General Partner at Benchmark
“As a People First investor, it is an honor to partner with the experienced founding team behind Sema4.ai as they pursue a transformational GenAI opportunity to accelerate the $88 billion AI economy. Our investment in Sema4.ai reflects our belief that plumbing layers drive enterprise adoption during paradigm shifts. In the age of AI, we think of this as ’cognitive plumbing,’ as models/middleware/tools, data, infrastructure, and semis/systems automate cognitive tasks to unlock new possibilities.”
– Navin Chaddha, Managing Partner at Mayfield
“We see Python as the language of choice for developing intelligent agents, and that’s why we expanded the Robocorp platform to focus on ’automation as code.’ Our new integration with LangChain makes it possible for AI developers to use LLMs to take direct action against their enterprise applications and data, closing the loop from conversation to action to get real work done.”
– Antti Karjalainen, founder and CEO at Robocorp and co-founder of Sema4.ai
