Arcade, a Startup of Agent infrastructure founded by former OKTA executive Alex Salazar and former Redis engineer, Sam Partee, has raised $ 12 million of Laude Ventures.
Laude is the new background launched in 2024 by the perplexity co -founder Andy Konwinski, UC Berkeley’s computer scientist who also co -founded Databricks.
This is not the only check that Laude has cut. But it is the first announced publicly, he told britcommerce, co -founder of Laude and his general partner, Pete Sonsini. Sonsini is known for his years in Nea, where he directed early investments in Databricks, any scale and perplexity.
As for Salazar, he is a repeated founder. He landed in OKTA after selling his API API of authentication, StormPath, to the company in 2017. He spent the following years in OKTA as vice president of building products. Part, meanwhile, had been building applications based on LLM and contributing to some key open source projects such as Langchain and Llamaindex, according to Arcade.
When Salazar saw the Chatgpt 3.5 debut, he saw the future and his next starting idea: a company of AI agents. Arcade was founded in February 2024.
Then he and part quickly discovered that AI agents really don’t work.
“We were trying to build a reliability agent of the site that was going to compete with [companies] Like Data Dog, “said Salazar. They don’t do much.”
Salazar and part continued “hitting our heads against the wall” trying to make their agent only connect to other services and obtain the necessary data to do their job.
One reason, they discovered, is because many agents use LLM trained in public data, but not in private data. For example, they can, for example, talk about the characteristics of the product, but cannot confirm that an order was delivered.
The couple decided that Arcade would do for ia agents what Okta Once Upon-A Time did for Saas Cloud Services. The founders created a tool call platform for their site reliability agent.
“The people were very surprised when we show them the demonstration of that agent. They wanted to know how they made the agent really work.
“Ultimately, we just looked at each other and said … why don’t we stop with the agent and sell the Underlying tool call platform?” Salazar said.
Enter Arcade, which helps each agent get access to the same privileges to the same applications and data as the worker he helps, or the work role he plays. Arcade is available through prices or subscriptions based on use.
Arcade is integrated with Oauth, so you can handle the authentications of thousands of Saas websites and websites. An intermediary also acts, which provides a safe token management that prevents them from accessing those credentials, Salazar said.
When Sonsini, who had backed Salazar with StormPath, heard that the founder was doing a new startup, approached and wanted to enter.
“We are very, very focused on super technical founders, so we are very connected to the research community. We have limited partners who are researchers,” said Sonsini.
While many IA start founders focus on the “brilliant object” around the LLM, such as agents, “my background is the lowest levels, the infrastructure where businesses of billions of dollars can be built,” said Sonsini. And Arcade “falls in that space.”