The news: Fixie, a new Seattle-based startup aiming to help companies fuse large language models into their software stack, raised a $17 million seed round.
The context: Large language models, or LLMs, are algorithms that power artificial intelligence systems such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT. They can ingest huge amounts of data, learn from those datasets to improve the algorithm, and perform a variety of natural language processing tasks. LLMs are gaining traction and attention with the proliferation of technologies such as ChatGPT.
The pitch: Fixie is positioning itself as an “automation platform for large language models.” It wants to help developers integrate any LLM into their own applications. “Fixie is a cloud-based platform for building, hosting, and scaling natural language agents that integrate with arbitrary tools, data sources, and APIs,” the company said in a blog post. “Fixie can be used to automate business processes, build natural language understanding into existing products, answer questions about data hosted behind APIs, and more.”
The use case: Fixie said its software can be used for customer support, business automation, business intelligence, content generation, CRM automations, and more. “We’re building solutions with customers to automate support ticket processing, enable custom chatbots that can query disparate data sources, and integrate generative AI into applicant tracking systems,” it said in the blog post.
The people: Fixie is led by CEO and co-founder Matt Welsh, a former engineering leader at Seattle machine learning startup OctoML. He was also a principal engineer at Google and did a brief stint with Apple’s machine intelligence team after it acquired Xnor.ai, a Seattle startup where Welsh worked.
Fixie’s other co-founders include CTO Justin Uberti, a longtime engineering leader who spent more than 14 years at Google, where he helped pioneer the Duo video calling app and run engineering for its Stadia cloud gaming service.
Co-founder and CPO Zach Koch was most recently director of product management at Shopify, and also spent time at Google, where he led teams working on Chrome and Pixel.
Co-founder and Chief AI Officer Hessam Bagherinezhad also worked at Xnor.ai, as head of machine learning, then spent more than two years at Apple as a machine learning engineer.
The investors: Redpoint Ventures led the seed round, which included participation from Madrona Venture Group, Zetta Venture Partners, SignalFire, Bloomberg Beta, and Kearny Jackson. Current and former execs at Google, Amazon, and Apple also invested.
The last word: “Existing LLMs are incredibly powerful and are only going to get more advanced, but the true magic comes from combining them with internal data and systems to dramatically improve the way businesses operate,” Erica Brescia, Redpoint managing director, said in a statement. “That’s precisely what Fixie delivers.”