Highlights:

  • ai Inc., a Seattle-based firm, has acquired USD 17 million in initial investment to assist businesses in integrating large language model AI agents into their applications.
  • Fixie is a cloud-based platform that enables developers to create, host, and grow AI agents that connect directly with their applications, utilizing accessible tools, data sources, and application programming interfaces.

Fixie.ai Inc., a Seattle-based firm, has acquired USD 17 million in initial investment to assist businesses in integrating large language model AI agents into their applications.

Large language models, or LLMs, are a form of artificial intelligence tool capable of reading, summarizing, generating text and other content, and holding conversations. With the introduction of chatbots such as ChatGPT from OpenAI LP, which has been incorporated into Microsoft Corp.’s products, such as its Bing search engine, their use has exploded in recent years.

Fixie is a cloud-based platform that enables developers to create, host, and grow AI agents that connect directly with their applications, utilizing accessible tools, data sources, and application programming interfaces. The company’s mission is to equip clients with everything they need to use any software they choose.

Matt Welsh, Chief Executive, said, “Fixie represents a foundational shift in building software, using LLMs as a computational engine. With Fixie, you wrap an existing data source or API in a little bit of code that hooks it up to a large language model of your choice. The resulting agent can then take English queries from end users, or even from other agents, and translate them into calls to that external system.”

Welsh was a previous technical leader of the machine learning firm OctoML Inc. and, prior to that, a principal engineer at Google LLC. His co-founders include Chief Technical Officer Justin Uberti, a former Google engineering executive, Chief Product Officer Zach Koch from Shopify Inc. and Google, and Chief AI Officer Hessam Bagherinezhad, who worked with Welsh at Xnor.ai Inc. before Apple Inc. purchased the company in 2020.

Fixie is releasing its platform as a trial for developers, allowing anybody to incorporate an LLM into their program, data, or tool. That comes shortly after OpenAI published a plugin for ChatGPT that enables developers to enhance the company’s GPT-4-powered chatbot capabilities.

The company’s platform supports GPT-4 out of the box, but it is meant to allow businesses to connect to whatever network they choose. Fixie also supports open-source and commercial models, including AI21’s Jurassic-2, GPT-NeoX, and Cohere. The platform manages all underlying LLM interactions and all developer-facing aspects, including user identification, authentication, session management, storage, and configuration.

Fixie has several use cases, including customer assistance, business automation, business intelligence, content development, and customer relationship management automation. A customer may, for instance, utilize the platform for scanning customer ticket information and responding to English questions regarding purchase history, generating data for a support agent when creating a return label, or responding to customer inquiries.

With Fixie, LLM technology can be immediately incorporated into any level of its application, and its operation may be customized. Fixie provides a primary platform that connects to data sources and APIs, allowing developers to select how to display this in their applications.

Redpoint Ventures led the seed round, with Madrona Venture Group, Zetta Venture Partners, SignalFire, Bloomberg Beta, and Kearny Jackson also participating. Welsh stated that the fresh money would enable the firm to extend its workforce and platform’s reach.

Erica Brescia, a managing director at Redpoint, said, “Existing LLMs are incredibly powerful and are only going to get more advanced, but the true magic comes from combining them with internal data and systems to dramatically improve the way businesses operate. That’s precisely what Fixie delivers.”

Access to the Fixie Developer Preview is presently accessible via the company’s API gateway, and developers have access to the open-source software development kit and code examples via the GitHub repository.