AI Chatbot Maker Adept Raises $350M, Cements Unicorn Status at $1B Valuation

AI chatbot maker Adept AI raised $350 million in Series B funding and helped cement its unicorn status, crossing the $1 billion post-money valuation mark. The company raised a $65 million Series A in April of 2022.

The round was co-led by General Catalyst and Spark Capital and included participation from several unnamed investors and new financial partners. In addition, “some of the most iconic companies in tech” participated, Adept said, including Nvidia Corp., Workday Inc. and Atlassian Corp. Plc.

Instead of generating text or images like competitors such as OpenAI, Adept’s platform can turn commands into actions to automate complex software workflows.

The company was founded less than a year ago by CEO David Luan CEO, who previously led Google’s large model program, and before that was head of engineering at OpenAI. Former Google Brain researchers Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar are also part of the founding team.

Large amounts of capital are being poured into the artificial intelligence of late. According to International Data Corporation, global spending on AI technologies is expected to reach $154 billion in 2023 as demand for AI-powered solutions increases.

In recent weeks, AI hardware and software startup Humane raised $100 million in a Series C round while Character, a startup developing AI chatbots that can mimic public figures, raised $250 million led by Andreessen Horowitz, valuing the platform at $1 billion.