By Anna Tong
SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Two former Meta artificial intelligence executives have raised $15 million for Yutori, a startup that will develop AI personal assistants, the company said on Thursday.
The round was led by Rob Toews at Radical Ventures, with participation from other investors like Felicis, “AI godmother” Fei-Fei Li, and Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean.
San Francisco-based Yutori is part of a slew of AI startups creating autonomous agents, or systems that use AI to perform actions on their own. Executives in the field such as OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar have said such systems will dominate the AI agenda this year, as models have recently gotten to the point where they can carry out the longer action sequences necessary to execute tasks online without human oversight.
“Right now there’s a lot happening with chatbots, but chatbots are not doing things for you in a way that can take things off your plate,” Yutori co-founder Devi Parikh told Reuters, saying the team has been working to redefine how users interact with autonomous AI agents, with a focus on improving efficiency for tasks ranging from online food orders to complex travel logistics.
Yutori says it is focusing on post-training models to make them better at navigating the web, or adapting the base models to hone their performance in specific ways after they have already been “trained” on reams of generalized data. Post-training has emerged as a crucial step in the development of new reasoning models such as OpenAI’s o1 and o3 models.
Yutori’s team includes Parikh, who led multimodal AI research at Meta, and Dhruv Batra, who led Meta’s embodied AI research, a team developing models that robots could use to navigate the 3D physical world. Other team members include the multimodal post-training leads for Llama 3 and Llama 4, Meta’s flagship open source models.
(Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco; Editing by Chris Reese)
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