Large enterprises are grappling with how to incorporate AI into their platforms and processes and are facing challenges. To actually use generative AI, it requires memory and its training data must be constantly updated. This field is now called “Live AI,” and many startups such as Cohere and Writer are working on this field. Another, Pathway, just raised $10 million in a seed round to build a live AI system that thinks and learns in real time, just like humans.
The round was led by TQ Ventures with participation from Kadmos, Innovo, Market One Capital, Id4, and angel investors. Other investors in Pathway include Lukasz Kaiser, co-author of Transformers and lead researcher on OpenAI's GPT o1.
Pathway's products include what it calls “infrastructure components” that utilize structured and unstructured data to power live AI systems. This means enterprise AI platforms can make decisions based on the latest knowledge. Previous customers include NATO and the French post office La Poste.
Zuzanna Stamirowska, co-founder and CEO of Pathway, told TechCrunch by phone: “The way deep learning and LLM assistants work is that you get the training data and then train the model. But the question is, how do you deal with knowledge and memory? Currently, LLM , they act like very smart interns who are recommended books to read. But they can't really memorize it. Plus, it's not live, it's static.”
To solve this, Pathway “allows developers to build pipelines that can feed live data into AI systems,” she said. Currently, we do this at the prompt stage when building an LLM or Gen AI application. ”
Moving to Menlo Park, Calif., Stamilowska assembled an impressive and highly skilled team to achieve the startup's goals. Her co-founders are CSO Adrian Kosowski and CTO Jan Chorowski, who previously worked with recent Nobel Prize in Physics winner and “Godfather of AI” Jeff Hinton. Stamilovska herself is the author of a state-of-the-art predictive model of complex networks in shipping published by the National Academy of Sciences.
“This company started with an idea that popped into my head one sunny morning in Chicago,” she said. “I was going with a friend to a scientific conference in theoretical computer science…we had a little disagreement and I said I have to start something on my own. So I used my laptop I took it out and started writing to people in my network about how to proceed with this. I still remember the taste of coffee at that time.”
I asked her how she sees Pathway compared to other startups in the space. “Cohere and Writer appear next to us in the latest Gartner quadrant for GenAI engineering and knowledge management use cases,” she said. “In corporate transactions, we often run into Palantir in AI transformation bids, but they are not as product-oriented as we are.”
Schuster Tanger, co-managing partner and co-founder of TQ Ventures, commented in a statement: At least the response from the developer community was strong. ”