Founders who were early in the race to develop self-driving cars have raised $15 million to: It's a startup that claims AI can create enterprise software on its own.
Cogna (as the UK-based startup is called) is led by Ben Peters, technology co-founder of FiveAI (a self-driving startup acquired by Bosch in 2022). Notion Capital is leading the Series A, with participation from Hoxton Ventures and Chalfen Ventures. This follows Cogna, which was founded in May 2023 and raised a $4.75 million seed round earlier this year from a number of investors, including Peters' FiveAI co-founder Stan Boland and Acorn Software founder Herman Hauser. Procured.
Cogna's focus is on the world of enterprise resource planning. ERP is an unassuming but highly necessary software component for running an organization, covering everything from procurement, supply chain, and inventory management to risk assessment, finance, and human resources. Large companies typically work with system integrators or consultancies to handle ERP, either by customizing off-the-shelf software for customers or by building custom applications from scratch to meet the organization's specific needs. contracts can pay up to billions of dollars.
In typical AI startup fashion, Peters believes this work is best done compressed into a purpose-built AI platform. While some challenges are much more difficult for AI to address than others, this may be one area where ERP is here to stay, and Cogna is a contributing player in that space. There were some early signs that it could be one of the. In the year since its launch, Cogna has signed deals with customers including British gas distributor Cadent Gas and infrastructure and utility service provider Network Plus.
“To be clear, none of our customers think of this as ERP software,” Peters said in an interview. “They have problems that cannot be solved by SAP or by using SAP. [another] legacy system. We provide custom, precision-built software for this purpose. they experience [it] It's like classic SaaS, but it just happens to be built for them and specifically for their workflow. And it's written by our AI. ”
Cogna uses a balanced combination of generative AI and other types of tools to actually assemble custom software. The company claims that non-technical teams can describe their problems in natural language and Cogna will do the rest.
“We are a team of experts in domain-specific languages, compilers, AI, and reliable and scalable enterprise SaaS,” said Peters.
These days, it's not uncommon to come across AI startups leveraging multiple large-scale language models simultaneously, depending on the specific task at hand. Customization is what makes a startup unique. That applies here as well. Peters said the language models used for people to interact with the company's platform come from a variety of providers, including OpenAI and Anthropic. These are “an important part of our 'natural language compiler,'” Peters told TechCrunch by phone.
In addition, Cogna is building an engine so that “software can truly write itself,” said Hoxton Ventures co-founder Hussein Khanji.
In doing so, Cogna will explore how generative AI, which has seen a viral explosion with the launch of consumer-accessible services like ChatGPT, is actually being incorporated into enterprise use and more complex applications. This is an example. Many fundamental AI companies like OpenAI have revealed that they have ambitions to enter the enterprise market, a highly lucrative sector that will help generate the huge returns that investors expect. This is important because
Kanji likens what Cogna is doing to Cursor, Anysphere's code construction tool backed by OpenAI. Last week, we broke the news that Anysphere was in the midst of a massive one-sided bidding war between investors looking for backing, valuing Anysphere at as much as $2.5 billion on the back of strong business growth. This field is clearly very hot, as it is highly rated.
“That's kind of what Cogna is also doing,” he said.
Based on his experience at self-driving technology company FiveAI, Peters is adept at spotting market opportunities early, but he also has experience in how to shift gears, so to speak, when plans don't go as expected. I am. .
“In 2018 I was driving around London,” he recalls. “[But] We then focused on providing a development environment to develop stacks for other companies that were building their own electronic design automation stacks. By the time we sold the company, we were running a million simulations a day. ”
Five.ai, which has raised approximately $78 million in funding, was valued at $216 million in its final round before being acquired by Bosch for an undisclosed amount.
Cogna is now planning to take on classic IT consulting firms such as Wipro and Capgemini.
The investment in Cogna is the first by Brian Gartner, formerly of Khosla Ventures, who joined Hoxton as a new partner last year.