Stack AI's co-founders, Antoni Rosinol and Bernardo Aceituno, were PhD students at MIT wrapping up their degrees in 2022 just as large language models were becoming more mainstream. ChatGPT will be released to the world at the end of the year, but even before that, they recognized a problem within companies that collect data with models without much expertise and knowledge – And they wanted to change that.
After graduating, he moved to San Francisco and joined the Winter 23 cohort at Y Combinator, where he launched Stack and refined his idea. Today, the company has created a low-code workflow automation tool designed to help companies build AI-powered workflows, for example, chatbots and AI assistants. The company has raised $3 million so far.
“Our platform allows people to create workflows that require connecting different tools to work together. We focus on connecting data sources and LLMs, because by doing that you allows for powerful workflow automation. We also offer many other tools and functions to automate complex business processes,” Aceituno told TechCrunch. They have only had the product working for six months but already over 200 customers have reported using the product.
Basically, it involves dragging components into the workflow canvas. It typically includes data sources such as Google Drive and LLM, as well as other workflow components such as a trigger component or an action component to create a workflow, allowing customers to create creative AI programs without a lot of coding. is allowed. The coding itself is not AI-powered, but the tasks in the workflow are frequent, and may require some manual coding to make the workflow work smoothly.
Some of their earliest customers are in the healthcare industry, and Aceituno admits they have to be careful with requests from doctors and patients, especially when internal data sources aren't always reliable or I may contain conflicting or outdated information.
In these cases, he says, it's important to trust the human expert, the doctor, to make the call on the quality of the answer. As another level of protection, they include source citations in each answer, so a health care professional can check the source before accepting the answer.
“That being said, it's true that you can put in garbage and then the referrals will be garbage, and that's why it's important that these contributors don't completely take over the process,” he said. said
Coming from MIT and starting a startup, Rosinol says that going to YC helped him understand the business side of things and how to improve his startup idea by working with customers.
“We started with an early version of this API, which was very developer-focused. And we started with some clients with the idea that we could use AI to automate RFP responses or automate sales. And working with clients, it became very clear that the real challenge was not in training a model, but in effectively querying and connecting data sources to those language models. ”
The company currently has six employees, but is hiring engineers and sales and marketing professionals.
The $3 million investment closed about a year ago. Investors include LambdaLabs, Y Combinator, Soma Capital and Epakon Capital along with Gradient Ventures, Beat Ventures and True Capital.