Adept AI Funding History
Adept AI developed ACT-1, a model that turns text instructions into actions in software. Members of its founding team later joined Amazon.
Company Overview
Adept AI
Founded 2021 · San Francisco, California, US
Official WebsiteAdept AI Funding Timeline
Series B
US$350 million · $1B valuation
Adept announced the round after demonstrating ACT-1, a model that could act across multiple software tools. It was hiring for engineering and product roles.
Led by General Catalyst. Participation included Addition, Greylock.
Source · adept.ai ↗Series A
US$65 million
Adept came out of stealth with plans to train models that could operate software and call APIs on a user’s behalf.
Led by Greylock, Addition. Participation included Scott Belsky, Chris Re, Karpathy, Jaan Tallinn.
Source · citybiz.co ↗
Adept AI Founding Team
Adept AI brought together researchers and engineers from language-model labs to explore how models could operate existing software. Its early work included ACT-1, a model that could turn written instructions into software actions. The founding team included Augustus Odena, Maxwell Nye, Erich Elsen, Kelsey Szot, Ashish Vaswani, and Niki Parmar.
- David Luan — CEO. Previously at Google, OpenAI and Stitch Fix.
Adept AI Company Development
The Amazon Licensing Deal
Adept’s early work on ACT-1 centered on turning written instructions into actions inside software. Its course changed in June 2024, when Amazon licensed the technology and hired the founding team, leaving the original company separate from the team that built the model.
Adept AI Competitive Landscape
General Software Actions and Coding Workflows
Adept’s ACT-1 was intended to operate different kinds of software from text instructions. Cognition’s Devin works in software engineering, where repositories, development tools and coding assignments give the agent a narrower remit. That comparison describes the original ACT-1 project, before Adept’s founding team moved to Amazon.
