As large enterprises consider how to integrate AI into their platforms and processes, they face challenges. Generative AI must have memory, and training data must be continuously updated for practical use. This area is currently called ‘Live AI’ and many startups, such as Cohere and Writer, are active in this space. Another company, Pathway, just raised a $10 million Seed round to build live AI systems that think and learn in real time like humans.
The round was led by TQ Ventures, with participation from Kadmos, Innovo, Market One Capital, Id4 and angel investors. Another investor in Pathway is Lukasz Kaiser, co-author of Transformers and GPT o1 core researcher at OpenAI.
Pathway’s products include ‘infrastructure components’ that power real-time AI systems and feed structured and unstructured data. This means that enterprise AI platforms can make decisions based on up-to-date knowledge. So far, customers include NATO and the French post office, La Poste.
Zuzanna Stamirowska, co-founder and CEO of Pathway, told TechCrunch over the phone: “The way deep learning and LLM assistants work is that they take training data and then train a model. But the problem is how to deal with knowledge and how to deal with memory. My current LLM behaves like a very smart intern who is offered a book to read on her first day at work. But they can’t really memorize it. Plus, it’s not live, it’s static.”
To solve this problem, she said Pathway allows developers to build pipelines that can feed real-time data into AI systems. Nowadays, we do this while building LLM applications or Gen AI applications.”
Moving to Menlo Park, California, Stamirowska has assembled an impressive and highly technical team to achieve the startup’s goals. Her co-founders are CSO Adrian Kosowski and CTO Jan Chorowski, who previously worked with Geoff Hinton, a recent Nobel Prize winner in physics and the “godfather of AI.” Stamirowska herself is the author of a cutting-edge predictive model for complex networks of maritime trade, published by the National Academy of Sciences.
“The company started as an idea that popped into my head one sunny morning in Chicago,” she said. “I was attending a scientific conference on theoretical computer science with a friend. We had a little disagreement, and I said I needed to get on with my job. So I got out my laptop and started writing to people in my network about how I was going to do this. “I still remember the taste of coffee back then,” he said.
I asked her how she sees Pathway compared to other startups in this space. “Cohere and Writer appear next to us in the latest Gartner Quadrants for their use cases in GenAI engineering and knowledge management,” she said. “In large corporate deals, we often come across Palantir to bid on AI innovation, but Palantir is less product-oriented than we are.”
Schuster Tanger, co-managing partner and co-founder of TQ Ventures, said in a statement: “Zuzanna and the Pathway team have cutting-edge insights and expertise in one of the most exciting areas of modern business. “At least the response from the developer community has been strong.”
