Arcade raises $12M from Perplexity co-founder’s new fund to make AI agents less awful

Arcade, an AI Agent Infrastructure Startup founded by former OKTA -Exec Alex Salazar and former Redis Engineer Sam Partee, has collected $ 12 million from Laude Ventures.

Laude was launched the new fund in 2024 by co-founder of Pertlexity Andy Konwinski, the UC Berkeley computer scientist who also established data tabricks.

This is not the only check that Laude has cut. But it is the first publicly announced, co-founder of Laude and general partner Pete Sonsini told WAN. Sonsini is known for his years at NEA, where he led early investments in Databricks, Anyscale and Pertlexity.

As far as Salazar is concerned, he is a repeated founder. He landed on OKTA after the sale of his authentication -API startup, Stormpath, to the company in 2017. He spent in the coming years at OKTA as VP building products. Pedee, for his part, had built on LLM-based applications and contributed to some important open source projects such as Langchain and Llamainadex, according to Arcade.

When Salazar saw Chatgpt 3.5’s debut, he saw the future and his next startup idea: an AI Agent Company. Arcade was founded in February 2024.

Then he and Partee soon discovered that AI agents did not really work.

“We tried to build a site -reliability agent who would compete with it [companies] Just like Data Dog, “Salazar said. They don’t do much. “

Salazar and Partee continued to “hit the wall our heads” and tried to get their agent only to connect to other services and to get the data needed to do their work.

One reason, they discovered is because many agents use LLMS who are trained on public data, but not private data. For example, they can talk about product functions, but cannot confirm that an order has been delivered.

The couple decided that Arcade would do for AI agents what OKTA once did for Saas Cloud Services. The founders built a tool platform for their site relationship agent.

“People were very surprised when we would show them the demo of that agent. They were not so interested in the agent himself,” Salazar said. They wanted to know how they actually let the agent work.

“In the end we just looked at each other and said … Why don’t we just stop with the agent and do we sell the underlying Tools-Calling platform?” Salazar said.

Enter Arcade that every agent helps to access the same privileges to the same apps and data as the employee who helps it, or the position it plays. Arcade is available through prices or subscriptions based on use.

Arcade integrates with Oauth, so it can handle the authentications of thousands of Saas services and websites. It also works an intermediary, which offers safe token management that prevents the LLMS from having access to those references, Salazar said.

When Sonsini, who had supported Salazar with StormPath, heard that the founder did a new startup, he stood out and wanted to inside.

“We are very, very focused on founders of the super -technical type, and so we are very connected to the research community. We have limited partners who are researchers,” Sonsini said.

While many AI startup founders are aimed at the “shiny object” around LLMS, such as agents, “My background is the lower levels, the infrastructure where companies can be built in billion dollars,” Sonsini said. And Arcade “falls exactly in that space.”