Applied Labs secures USD $4.2 million to boost AI solutions

Applied Labs has secured USD $4.2 million in funding to support its efforts in enhancing AI solutions for business operations and customer support roles.

Applied Labs, co-founded by Michael Woo and Soham Waychal in January 2024, announced the completion of its latest funding round.

The initiative, led by Abstract with contributions from Point72 Ventures, Outlander, and Tetra, elevates the company's total funding to USD $5.2 million. Noteworthy angel investors, including Vercel CEO Guillermo Rauch and ex-Twitter executive Ali Rowghani, also participated.

The announcement comes as companies increasingly grapple with unreliable AI systems unable to manage complex and critical workflows. Applied Labs aims to address these concerns by developing AI agents equipped to handle such tasks reliably, informed by the founders' experience at Scale AI.

Michael Woo, who took a leading role in operations scalability at Scale AI, said, "For companies, there's an explosion of C-Suite and boardroom interest into the question, what is our AI strategy? The bottleneck isn't the model anymore - LLM quality, speed and cost have reached an inflection point where almost every business can save time, cost and improve the quality of their support and ops. The challenge is in the data, tools and platform for teams to easily setup and perfect AI agents on their business-critical workflows. We're obsessed with making our AI agents the best where if you're not using them, you're falling behind."

The current focus of Applied Labs is on developing end-to-end AI customer support agents that are finely tuned to a business's specific knowledge base and are capable of executing AI actions that integrate with both first and third-party systems.

The company is also working on digital employees in operational roles, maintaining that human involvement remains essential for ensuring quality, as Woo suggests "AI allows you to scale up your best human judgement on an infinite volume of tasks but human judgment is still necessary to get the best quality results and handle edge cases."

The team is leveraging their previous experience to ensure their AI solutions stand out for reliability and ease of use. Features include managing omnichannel interactions and offering comprehensive evaluation tools that incorporate human oversight, vital for maintaining a balance between AI efficiency and human empathy, especially in complex scenarios.

Applied Labs is aware of the high stakes of improper AI deployment, which can seriously impact trust and operations if handled poorly. "At Scale when we first did AI labeling or if you think about self-driving cars or even these AI sales agents, if you scale up a poorly thought out AI response or workflow on high volume, it's deeply damaging," Woo remarked. The company thus prioritizes stringent testing processes, with extensive human-in-the-loop auditing before introducing new functionalities.

The recent investment will also back Applied Labs' efforts to expand its workforce of engineers as they pursue an ambitious product development roadmap. The company intends to double its headcount shortly, reflecting increasing customer demand.

Ramtin Naimi, Founder & General Partner of Abstract, commented on the venture, saying, "Few founders truly grasp the operational intricacies of deploying AI in mission-critical workflows.

Michael's experience managing Scale AI's core data product brings a rare fusion of technical acumen and practical experience — exactly what's needed to make AI both dependable and transformative. Applied Labs' commitment to pairing trust with capability, underpinned by their human-in-the-loop approach, is precisely what enterprises need to confidently embrace AI-powered customer support. We couldn't be more excited to partner with Michael and his team on this journey."

Michael Woo further emphasized, "Technical decision makers will save their team countless hours everyday on the most frustrating and repetitive workflows... AI agents, when crafted correctly by the right person, allow you to scale up your best human thinking on repetitive support interactions or ops workflows helping save significant time without sacrificing quality."

Applying its expertise, Applied Labs aspires to carve a path that harmonises machine efficiency with human judgment by focusing on reliability and providing non-technical teams the tools needed to solve intricate issues through AI.