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After a long week of cod , you might assume San Francisco ’s constructor would retreat into the Bay Area ’s mountains , beaches or vivacious clubbing scene . But in reality , when the calendar week barricade , theAI hackathonsbegin .
In the last few years , San Francisco has explode with AI hackathons . On any give Saturday or Sunday , technologists give talk of the town on the late advances in AI , electronic web and — most importantly — make ideas into working demonstrations . Sometimes , hackathons offer prizes in the physique of hard currency or swarm credit , but the real winners walk away with the glimmer of a inauguration .
“ There ’s no good place in the world to build the most ambitious project of your life than San Francisco , ” saysAgency AIco - founder Alex Reibman . “ You frequently see gross ton of competitions — like hackathons — but they ’re not vie against each other . It ’s just as much collaborative as it is competitive . ”
Last summertime at a San Francisco hackathon , Reibman decided to try his hand at building AI agents that could come up the web . Agents are a hot subject in Silicon Valley as the AI roar peaks . The termisn’t on the button set , but generally key out AI - based bot that can perform tasks automatically , using interfaces and services that were not originally design to be automated — a kind of permutation for terrene chore that used to require human treatment .
But Reibman at once course into a trouble . “ They suck , ” said Reibman in an interview . “ The agents fail like 30 to 40 % of the metre , and often in unexpected way . ”
To pay back that , Reibman ’s squad built intimate debugging tools to see where their agents were go incorrect . They finish up getting the agents to work a little considerably , but the debugging dick themselves ended up stealing the show and winning the hackathon .
“ I started show the tools at a bunch of hackathons and events in San Francisco , and masses set off call for for access to them , ” said Reibman . “ That was basically the confirmation I needed : Instead of establish an agent ourselves , we should build tools to make it sluttish to build agents . ”
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So Reibman started Agency alongside his co - laminitis Adam Silverman and Shawn Qiu , offering tools to honour what AI agent are in reality doing , and catch where they ’re going wrong . A class by and by , those tools ultimately became Agency ’s core product , the AgentOps political program , which is now used by thousand of teams monthly , Reibman tells TechCrunch . The startup has now raised $ 2.6 million in pre - seed financial support , led by 645 Ventures and Afore Capital .
main operating officer Adam Silverman tells TechCrunch that AgentOps is like “ multi - gadget direction for agents , ” analyse everything the agent does to ensure it does n’t go rogue .
“ You want to empathise whether your agent is start to go rogue and identify what limitations you may put in home , ” said Silverman in an interview . “ A circle of the work is being able-bodied to visually see where your guardrails exist , and whether the federal agent abides by them , before tossing them into yield . ”
The startup partners with Cohere and Mistral , AI model developer that also offer agent innovation services , so that customer can apply the AgentOps ’ dashboard to see how agents interact with the world , and how much each one costs . Agency is model - agnostical , intend it works with several dissimilar AI factor framework , but is mix with popular tools such as Microsoft ’s AutoGen , crewAI and AutoGPT .
Beyond the AgentOps ’ fascia , Agency also offers consulting avail ( Reibman was previously at confabulate house EY ) to help businesses get started building agent . Agency would n’t divvy up any client by name , but share that hedge funds , consultant and selling firms are using their tools .
For deterrent example , Reibman says Agency help create an AI agent that write web log posts about company the customer is working with . Now , the same customer uses the AgentOps dashboard to get over the factor ’s operation and costs .
Major player like OpenAI and Google are potential to progress out their agent products in the come months , and AI inauguration like Agency have to picture out how to work out alongside those advance , not against them .
“ There ’s so many layers in the push-down stack , it ’s not probable the LLM provider will attempt to fascinate all of them , ” said Reibman . “ OpenAI and Anthropic are building the agent builder , but there ’s all these layers around it to verify you have a production - quick codification base . ”
