Two former Meta artificial intelligence executives raised $15 million for Yutori, a startup that will develop AI personal assistants.
The mentioned startup, based in San Francisco, announced the received funding on Thursday, March 27.
The financing round was led by Rob Toews at Radical Ventures. Other investors also participated in this process, including Felicis, AI godmother Fei-Fei Li, and Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean.
Yutori is on the list of startups in the area of artificial intelligence that develop autonomous agents or systems that use AI to perform actions independently. Executives in the sector, such as OpenAI chief financial officer Sarah Friar, the mentioned systems will dominate the agenda of the digital intelligence industry in the current year. In the context of the relevant statements, in most cases, attention is drawn to the fact that the specified configurations of machine intelligence have reached a level at which they can carry out longer sequences of actions. This means increasing the ability needed to complete tasks online without human intervention.
Yutori co-founder Devi Parikh said during a conversation with media representatives that a lot is happening with chatbots right now, but these functional systems are not doing anything for people that could take things off their plate. It was also noted that the startup’s team is working to redefine how users interact with autonomous artificial intelligence agents, paying special attention to improving efficiency in solving a wide variety of tasks, including, for example, online food orders and complex travel logistics.
Yutori says it is focusing on post-training models to make them better at navigating the web or adapting basic models to hone their performance in certain 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.
Devi Parikh led multimodal AI research at Meta. The startup’s team also includes Dhruv Batra, who led Meta’s embedded AI research, a group 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.
It is worth noting that against the background of the active development of artificial intelligence, the issue of cybersecurity has become more relevant. Scammers also have access to AI tools. To counteract the corresponding threat in the virtual space, personal awareness of users is important. For example, an Internet search query such as how to know if my camera is hacked will allow anyone to get information about signs of unauthorized access to the device.
