AI agents startup Cakewalk has raised a $7.5m seed round led by Kindred Capital and San Francisco-based VC firm Vertex Ventures.
AI “agents” — apps using large language models (LLMs) to automate complex tasks without human oversight — are the latest buzzy category in VC land. European startups building AI agents raised €827m in Q1 of this year, more than the money raised by GenAI companies in the same period, according to Sifted data.
Cakewalk also won the backing of Tim Sadler, founder of cloud email security platform Tessian, and existing investors Fly Ventures and Seedcamp.
The company — named after the English expression describing a surprisingly easy task — is building a suite of AI agents to help companies manage which individuals have access to the various software it uses.
Traditionally, small and medium businesses have struggled to keep track of who has access to what, a problem made worse by companies introducing new AI agents, APIs and non-human identities into their workflows.
“Employees in tech driven companies have created tons of access themselves in a super distributed manner. If you have a lot of access as a company, you have a larger tech surface and you get very vulnerable to insider and outsider attacks,” says Johannes Keienburg, cofounder and CEO of Cakewalk.
“This is really a massive security and compliance issue for companies.”
Cakewalk builds multiple agents under the name “Agent Cake”. One of the company’s agents announced Wednesday focuses on automating cumbersome tasks for IT and security teams, such as creating and removing ‘seats’ for users across software they are permitted, or not permitted, to have access to.
It also has an agent that employees can use to chat to Cakewalk, allowing them to question who the owner of a specific software is in the company and request access.
Cakewalk also has another agent helping companies to understand and keep track of what AI agents are being used by the company internally.
Founded in June 2022, Cakewalk emerged from stealth a year later and quickly raised a €3m seed round. Its team has doubled since then to 20 people, the majority of whom are engineers. It doesn’t plan to make any further hires this year.
The company will use the fresh capital to invest further in its engineering and product capability — which is necessary for a “highly technical problem,” says Keienburg.
“Making this very light and easy-to-use is sort of not an easy task,” he adds.
Read the orginal article: https://sifted.eu/articles/ai-agents-7m-seed/
