Artificial intelligence development startup aiXplain Inc. said today it raised $6.5 million in a pre-Series A round to simplify building autonomous AI agents with its all-in-one studio for custom solutions.

The company provides a low-code/no-code platform and infrastructure for activating and deploying generative AI agents, which are pieces of software that can perform tasks independently and autonomously without human intervention. These agents can learn patterns and create new content, such as text or images and hold conversations in natural language while understanding business logic.

Wa’ed Ventures, a Saudi Arabian venture capital fund backed by Aramco led the round. Prominent angel investors Osama Elkady, co-founder and chief executive of data analytics startup Incorta Inc., and global business expert Kane Minkus also participated in the round. Including the company’s $8 million seed round in April 2023, aiXplain has raised $14.5 million to date.

For many companies ,building and operating AI agents is out of reach, aiXplain CEO Hassan Sawaf told SiliconANGLE in an interview. Building practical AI solutions, especially autonomous solutions has become the mainstay of big tech companies with significant resources, engineering talent and capability. To disrupt this trend, Sawaf launched aiXplain’s platform to provide the tools and resources needed for both AI experts and everyday workers to build and deploy AI apps.

“We don’t need Ph.D.s to build agents anymore,” Sawaf said. “It’s actually more important, more relevant, for a company to have people who are domain experts in their field and have the right tools in their hands to build anything, any system, any solution, versus basically needing to be deeply knowledgeable about AI. This is our philosophy.”

To assist everyday customers in building AI agents, aiXplain launched Bel Esprit, what Sawaf calls a “Super Agent,” or an AI agent application that transforms written prompts into deployable AI solutions, essentially acting as an on-call solutions architect.

AiXplain’s marketplace already connects more than 40,000 ready-to-use AI assets, pipelines and tools from numerous suppliers that allow knowledgeable developers to build their own use cases easily with a visual low-code interface. These include custom-built AI assets, third-party assets from OpenAI, Google LLC, Amazing Web Services Inc., Microsoft Inc.’s Azure and many other AI technology providers.

Bel Esprit works within this interface to automatically build and deploy applications according to the needs of the user with conversational prompts, allowing users to refine them with back-and-forth replies.

“If you give a doctor the right tools to experiment with AI and without needing to wait for an engineer to support them, that’s basically where innovation comes from,” Sawaf said. “After they’re done with their experimentation, they can always just use it or they can still go back to an engineer and say, ‘I have built this system, why don’t you take it for last mile optimization?’”

In terms of business reach, Sawaf said that the company has been spending the past few years building its models to be more culturally adaptive because being from Silicon Valley most of its training data is English-oriented. This means most models didn’t adapt well in regions such as Africa or Saudi Arabia. Over the past three years, the company has gained good experience with multilingual model training for the Arabic-speaking world, which Sawaf said is helping the company “build a bridge between Silicon Valley and the Middle East region.”

“We’re kind of the tissue which is holding some companies together and coordinating and synchronizing in the context of building, such as benchmarks and how to test, how to evaluate, how to make models available to each other and whatnot,” Sawaf said. “And we’re banking on that and building this capability out over the next few months.”

Sawaf said that the new funds will go to expanding the company’s technical team of AI experts to tackle the growing feature request list that customers have been clamoring for. With the new funding, he said, it will enable the company to scale up and evaluate where aiXplain can best place its resources to provide the best value.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Microsoft Designer