Yutori, a US-based AI assistant startup founded by two former Meta executives, has raised $15m in seed funding.
The funding round was led by Radical Ventures and saw participation from Felicis and more than a dozen angel investors, including Fei-Fei Li and Jeff Dean.
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Investors namely Elad Gil, Sarah Guo from Conviction, and Sandhya Venkatachalam from Axiom also took part.
Yutori is co-founded by AI researchers Abhishek Das, Devi Parikh, and Dhruv Batra.
Devi Parikh was previously a senior director at Meta, where she led research in multimodal generative AI, contributing to projects like Llama 3, Make-A-Scene, Make-A-Video, and Emu.
Dhruv Batra also worked as a senior director at Meta, focusing on research related to embodied agents, which supported the multimodal assistant in the Ray-Ban Meta glasses and demos from Boston Dynamics through Meta’s FAIR division.
Das’ PhD thesis, Building Agents that can See, Talk, and Act, was a finalist for the AAAI/ACM SIGAI doctoral dissertation award in 2020.
The startup focuses on developing personal AI assistants to automate digital tasks. It uses an agent-first approach for building such personal AI assistants to ensure accuracy and reliability across the web.
The funds will be utilised to expedite the development of Yutori’s agent-first approach, expand its engineering and design teams, and prepare for the product launch.
Yutori said it plans to offer early adopters the opportunity to participate in a closed beta version of its first product offerings later in 2025.
Yutori co-CEO and co-founder Devi Parikh said: “Productivity isn’t about cramming more into your day — it’s about reclaiming your attention for what truly matters, and amplifying the outcomes of the time you give something.
“Yutori’s mission is to build the best AI assistants to make space for the meaningful things in life.
The company refines foundation models after training to enhance their autonomy, using a multi-agent system capable of handling multiple tasks and sub-tasks in parallel for high efficiency.
Yutori chief scientist and co-founder Dhruv Batra said: “What differentiates chatbots from agents is an external environment. The web is the ultimate digital environment — if a task can be done digitally, it can be done via the web.
“But the web is dynamic, non-deterministic, and noisy; which means mistakes are inevitable and the key agentic skill is resilience. Yutori’s agent-first approach will unlock superhuman performance on this grand challenge.”
