Relevance AI raises $15 million for its low-code workplace platform

Australian SaaS startup Relevance AI has raised $15 million in a Series A funding round, led by King River Capital, with participation from Peak XV’s Surge, Galileo Ventures and Insight Partners.

Low code solutions that defy popular AI tropes

Launched in 2020 by Daniel Vassilev, Jacky Koh, and Daniel Palmer, Relevance AI aims to provide businesses with low-code tools to build custom AI agents. These AI agents are intended to autonomously perform detailed workflows or tasks, with the platform aiming to improve worker performance.

‘Automation’, ‘productivity’ and ‘performance’ are words that have been liberally thrown around in the oversaturated AI space over the last 12 months.

According to Palmer, tools such as ChatGPT largely act as a copilot, whereas Relevance AI is considering things differently.

“The way we’re thinking about AI is to use it as an enabler for Autopilot, leveraging it to be able to make decisions through ‘reasoning’ but ultimately to help complete entire tasks,” Palmer said to SmartCompany.

“Furthermore, we believe that subject-matter experts are necessary in creating these AI teams which is why we have a low-code builder to help them define the workflows they want the agents to follow and make sure it’s the way they do work.”

Relevance AI also seems to be skirting other popular generative AI practices.

“In building our product, we spend a significant amount of time thinking about what the interface between people and an AI Workforce will look like. We know a ‘chat’ interface has been very popular right now but we don’t believe this is the long-term interface that will persist with managing a workforce,” Palmer said.

‘We want to make sure that we constantly lowering the barrier for customers to be able to “onboard” these agents by giving them natural language instructions and providing their standard operating procedure (SOP) as a flowchart.”

Relevance AI is going hard on automation in the workplace

Over the past three months, Relevance AI reports that around 6,000 companies have registered to use its platform, deploying over 250,000 tasks. These range from answering customer inquiries to managing sales operations and conducting market research. The diversity of these tasks indicates a broad potential application for the platform across different industries.

“Our tools have been used to help automate individual tasks, all the way from things like reviewing 5000 patents which usually takes three weeks in a day, or synthesising user research in a few minutes,” Palmer said.

Relevance AI emphasises task-based outcomes over a traditional assistant interface. This strategy aims to streamline work processes, particularly for roles like product managers and engineers.

The startup has launched two products to date – AI Tools which are designed to automate repetitive tasks within existing workflows, and the aforementioned AI Agents, which can manage complete workflows, including research, marketing, and sales functions.

“Our agent offering has only just gone live and we’ve started onboarding customers from our waitlist. However, we’ve been using it for the last four months for our own sales needs and it has entirely transformed the way we think about doing sales,” Palmer said.

According to Palmer, the agents’ product has allowed Relevance AI to focus on quality time with prospective customers, rather than sinking time into scheduling and answering basic questions.

“For example, our Business Development Representative (BDR) agent can personalise outreach to a prospect after taking a look at their profile and researching their company to speak much more directly to their pain points and how our value prop can help them. This has in return given us a higher response rate,” Palmer said.

“We’re super excited to be onboarding customers onto our BDR agent at the moment and look at opening it up more broadly in 2024.”

As we transition from 2023 to 2024, the conversation has shifted rapidly from ‘efficiency’ to ‘safety’. Businesses aren’t just interested in implementing AI, but in doing it in a way that protects them. And that’s fair considering the handling of sensitive data, as well as regulation still burgeoning across the globe.

That’s why we’re seeing the likes of Canva and Leonardo.Ai on the front foot offering ‘shield’ products to provide enterprise users with indemnification.

Relevance AI also says that it is operating with a security-first mindset.

“It’s top of mind for us. We protect our client’s data in a few ways. Firstly, we don’t store their input or their outputs. Our platform is also SOC 2 Type II compliant,” Palmer said.

“We offer hosting in 3 regions (US, EU, and Australia) so it can stay in a jurisdiction of choice. We also don’t use any customer data to train our models; we lean into open-source and synthetic data.”

Relevance AI’s plans for the future

The company has bold ambitions for the workplaces of the future, imagining that every team will employ at least one AI agent by 2025 and that by 2030, teams in general will be supported by comprehensive AI units.

“Until now, AI has focused on improving individual efficiency. People are using AI as a co-pilot to help perform small parts of a single task but if we’re to realise the true potential of AI, businesses need teams of AI agents with different specialties that work together to complete complex tasks, autonomously. We call this an AI workforce and we see this as the future,” Palmer said.

Palmer went on to say that AI has the potential to add “trillions” to the global economy.

“But that can only be realised when we harness the true power of AI — moving away from AI being a co-pilot, but a true team member. Our future focus is helping businesses build these AI workforces to supercharge productivity and ultimately scale quicker. Because by doing so, teams are only limited by their ideas, not their size.”

As for the more immediate future, Relevance AI is exploring multimodal use cases for the platform involving image and audio. It also plans to expand its team to 30 by mid-2024 and to push further into the US market by establishing an office in San Francisco in the next 12 months.