OpenAI is backing a California AI startup that recently emerged from stealth mode and aims to revolutionize complex automation processes for enterprises.
San Francisco-based Poetic completed a $50 million Series A funding round at a $500 million valuation, led by venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, with Founders Fund and First Harmonic as other participants.
What makes Poetic’s product proposition distinctive is the company’s promise of a fundamentally different approach to overhauling some of the processes that underpin key industries such as healthcare, banking and insurance — by using what the vendor says is a “new class of software that learns like AI but runs like code.”
The company set out its premise in a release, stating: “For years, generative AI has promised to solve these [industries’] problems, yet its impact has remained largely superficial, with arms-length integrations via LLMs that aren’t built to handle mission-critical tasks.”
The alternative, according to Poetic, is to develop ultra-reliable software that can deliver near-perfect accuracy over and over again, thousands of times a day, and that entails eschewing the use of autonomous agents, which can be difficult to control.
Instead, Poetic claims to have developed a purpose-built programming language that enables operators to define workflows in natural language, learn every edge case, then encode them and run processes deterministically.
Alongside the claimed huge improvements in accuracy, Poetic also promises significant cost savings, with the tech operating at a fraction of the cost of traditional AI agents.
The vendor has already been deployed at a number of the world’s leading financial organizations, including insurer AIG, fintech giant SoFi and fintech company Chime Financial, where it has been used to automate complicated processes such as transaction monitoring and dispute investigations.
Chime, for example, claims to have already resolved more than half a million disputes using Poetic workflows, while SoFi said the tech had allowed it to take over many of its fraud processes in a matter of weeks, while improving quality metrics.
OpenAI’s involvement with Poetic, meanwhile, again reflects the growing importance of enterprise to the company as it moves towards an IPO.
Poetic says it plans to use the funding to expand its team, attract new clients and expand into more industries.
