Exclusive: Former Palantir execs raise $30M for new startup
Illustration: Allie Carl/Axios
Edra, an automation platform startup, raised $30 million led by Sequoia Capital, 8VC, and A*, its founders tell Axios Pro.
The big picture: Founded by Palantir's former co-heads of forward deployed AI engineering — Edra is taking a new approach to forward deployed-engineering, making the role more AI heavy.
- Pioneered by Palantir, FDE embeds engineers inside of a business customer, allowing them to personalize tech for the organization.
- Though hugely popular — especially as AI companies seek to make inroads with corporations and companies seek to embed the tech — FDE roles have faced criticism for requiring significant manual work.
How it works: Edra uses AI to analyze an organization's records and, as CEO Eugen Alpeza puts it, "reverse engineers" instructions to train agents and models.
Zoom in: Humans employees aren't usually bequeathed step-by-step guides on how to do a job that meet AI standards.
- Edra's users can continuously teach their agents in plain English, and use past correspondences to teach the AI how to approach edge cases — like how a IT agent should resolve an issue of a lost laptop.
- "Deploying AI in any large organization [requires that] you have a clear account of how you want things done today. And no large organization actually has that," Alpeza says.
Behind the scenes: Edra is focused on specific use cases, with IT service management (ITSM) being its largest business line. Its customers that include ASOS, Hubspot, and Cushman & Wakefield.
- 8VC and A* led the company's $6.5 million seed, while Sequoia led the $23.8 million Series A.
The bottom line: The duo believes the company can go after broader use cases in the future, becoming infrastructure for employees inside companies to train AI, at a time when businesses like Mercor are helping AI companies train their models with outside domain experts.
- "I think they can go really far by doing [IT Service Management]," says Sequoia partner Luciana Lixandru. "Then there's opportunity to become a horizontal platform in the enterprise."
