Artificial intelligence startup Applied Labs Inc. today announced that it has closed a $4.2 million seed round to support its growth efforts.

Early-stage venture fund Abstract led the investment with participation from Point72 Ventures, Outlander and Tetra. Several angel investors participated as well. Applied Labs’ total outside funding now stands at $5.2 million.

New York-based Applied Labs was launched last January by Chief Executive Officer Michael Woo (pictured, right) and Chief Technology Officer Soham Waychal (left). The duo previously worked at Scale AI Inc., a heavily funded startup that provides training datasets for companies such as OpenAI. Forbes reported today that Applied Labs has about a dozen customers and is “quickly” growing its revenue.

The company’s flagship offering is a cloud platform that helps organizations automate customer support tasks using AI agents. Agents are AI models configured to perform a narrow set of tasks with a high degree of autonomy. According to Applied Labs, its platform is capable of resolving support tickets that usually take days to process in under three minutes.

The platform can field customer requests from a company’s website, call center, WhatsApp account and other sources. It generates responses based on information in the company’s internal data repositories. It also customizes each reply based on factors such as customer sentiment and the urgency of a support ticket. 

According to Applied Labs, its AI agents can not only surface information for customers but also take actions in backend systems. A company could, for example, configure the software to sync every resolved support ticket to its customer relationship management platform. The software also lends itself to more advanced tasks such as processing online shoppers’ refund requests. 

The platform connects to the systems in which it performs business tasks using a set of prepackaged connectors. If the tasks involved in resolving a support ticket are too complex for the built-in AI, it routes the request to human help desk representatives. A centralized inbox enables support teams to view customer inquiries from multiple sources in one place. 

The platform also provides the ability to create AI workflows for automating back-office chores. An accounting team, for example, can build a workflow that extracts key information from financial documents and loads it into a database. Business analysts can use the AI to detect when a competitor launches a new product or lowers prices.

Applied Labs provides AI workflow templates for common business tasks. According to the company, users with more advanced requirements can create custom workflows in a few days. 

An analytics dashboard enables customers to monitor how the platform performs business tasks. It lists all the actions taken by the built-in AI agents, highlights errors and points out which systems are affected by those errors. An auditing tool enables companies to download a sample of the activity logs collected by Applied Labs and use the information to create AI performance reports. 

“The bottleneck isn’t the model anymore — LLM quality, speed and cost have reached an inflection point where almost every business can save time, cost and improve the quality of their support and ops,” Woo said. “The challenge is in the data, tools and platform for teams to easily setup and perfect AI agents on their business-critical workflows.”

Applied Labs will use the proceeds from its seed round to increase the number of tasks that its platform can automate and hire more engineers.

Photo: Applied Labs