6 days ago
Seattle startup backed by former Google CEO lands $16M to automate repetitive tasks on a computer
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Vercept team members, from left: Matt Deitke, co-founder; Kiana Ehsani, CEO; Ross Girshick, co-founder; Cam Sloan, member of technical staff; Kuo-Hao Zeng, founding researcher; Harshitha Rebala, member of technical staff; Eric Kolve, founding engineer; and Luca Weihs, co-founder. Not pictured: Oren Etzioni, co-founder. (Vercept Photo)
Vercept revealed this week that it raised a $16 million seed round in January from venture capital firms and prominent tech leaders to build what it describes as the 'computer interface of the future.'
The Seattle-based startup, founded last year by a group of former Allen Institute for AI (Ai2) research leaders, has some big name backers including Eric Schmidt, former CEO and chairman at Google; Jeff Dean, chief scientist of Google DeepMind; Kyle Vogt, founder and former CEO of Cruise; Arash Ferdowsi, co-founder of Dropbox; and other longtime tech vets.
San Francisco-based Fifty Years led the seed round, which also included Point Nine and Seattle-based AI2 Incubator, the company's first institutional investor.
GeekWire first covered Vercept in February when it emerged from stealth mode.
Vercept last month revealed Vy, its Mac app that 'sees' and understands computer screens like a human would. It records a user performing tasks across different software or websites — and then autonomously runs the same workflow from a natural language command.
The idea is to use AI to automate repetitive tasks, like entering data, producing video content, organizing invoices, and more.
Vercept is similar to so-called robotic process automation (RPA) companies such as UiPath and Automation Anywhere, which deploy software robots that mimic human actions.
But the startup is 'fundamentally different,' said Vercept CEO and co-founder Kiana Ehsani, who described the product as a 'unified paradigm for interacting with the computer.'
'Unlike traditional RPA solutions, Vy doesn't require hardcoded interactions, pre-built connectors, or APIs to engage with new software,' Ehsani said. 'Whether dealing with legacy applications that lack APIs or modern web platforms, Vy's form of interaction remains consistent, intuitive, and flexible.'
OpenAI (Operator), Google (Project Mariner), Amazon (Nova Act), and others recently released tools that automate tasks across browsers and apps, fueled by advances in generative AI.
Vercept is building its own model called VyUI, which powers its soon-to-be-released API. 'We envision developers using our API to build a wide range of products and applications, for example: automatic UI test suites, computer and web use agents, RPA solutions, and so on,' the company says on its website.
Vercept says VyUI beats competitors on various benchmarks.
Ehsani didn't share user growth metrics or revenue data, but said the reception to Vy has exceeded expectations.
'Our user community is wonderfully diverse, from individuals with disabilities integrating their own speech-to-text systems to remotely control their computers, to students leveraging Vy to streamline their homework tasks, to businesses using Vy to automate their workflows,' she told GeekWire.
Ehsani previously oversaw the Ai2 robotics and embodied artificial intelligence teams as a senior researcher.
Others on the Vercept founding team include:
Oren Etzioni, who was the founding CEO of AI2 before stepping down in 2022.
Matt Deitke, who led the development of Ai2 research projects including Molmo, ProcTHOR, and Objaverse.
Luca Weihs, previously Ai2 research manager and infrastructure team lead, working in areas including AI agents and reinforcement learning.
Ross Girshick, a pioneer in the combination of computer vision and deep learning, and a former research scientist at Meta AI and Ai2.
Vercept has eight full-time employees. The company was spotlighted in a recent Startup Radar post on GeekWire.
