Arcade, an AI agent infrastructure start -up founded by former Okta Exec Salazar and former Redis engineer SAM PARTEE, raised $ 12 million in Laude Ventures.
Laude is a new fund launched by UC Berkeley computer scientist, co -founded by Andy Konwinski, co -founder of Perplexity in 2024.
Laude is not the only check. But Laude co -founder and general partner, Pete Sonsini, is the first public announcement released in Techcrunch. Sonsini is well known in the NEA for several years, which has led to initial investments in the data business, all scale and embarrassment.
Salazar is a repeat founder. He landed in OKTA in 2017 after selling certification API startups STORMPATH to the company. He has been sent to OKTA as a vice president for the next few years. According to Arcade, PARTEE has built an LLM -based application and contributed to major open source projects such as Langchain and LlamainDex.
When Salazar saw his debut in CHATGPT 3.5, he saw the future and his next start -up idea AI agent company. The arcade was founded in February 2024.
Then he and PARTEE quickly found that AI agents didn’t actually work.
Salazar said, “We tried to build a reliability agent to compete with the same (Data Dog).
Salazar and PARTEE continued to “keep our heads to the walls,” agents tried to get the data necessary to connect to other services and to perform.
One reason is that many agents use LLM, which has been trained for public data, but not personal data. For example, you can talk about product functions, but you can’t confirm that your order is delivered.
This pair has been to AI agent, OKTA, OKTA decided to do what he did for the SaaS Cloud service at once. The founders have built a tool -based platform for the site reliability agent.
Salazar said, “People were very surprised when we showed the demonstration of the agent.
“Ultimately, we just saw each other and said. Why don’t we sell a platform that stops with the agent and calls basic tools?” Sarazar said.
Go to Arcade and help you to access the same apps and data as the worker or job role supported by each agent. The arcade is provided through the usage -based price or subscription.
Arcade is integrated with OAUTH, so you can handle thousands of SaaS services and authentication of websites. In addition, Salazar said, Salazar, which acts a broker to prevent LLMS itself from accessing the credentials.
Sonsini, who supported Salazar with STORMPAAR, heard that the founder was doing a new startup, he reached out and wanted.
Sonsini said, “We are very well connected to the research community because we are very focused on very technical types of founders.
Sonsini said that many AI startup founders are focusing on the “shiny objects” around the LLM, while “My background is an infrastructure that can build billions of dollars of business.” And the arcade said, “It falls directly from that space.”
