Former Meta Executives Raise $15 Million for AI Assistant Startup Yutori

Former Meta executives raise $15 million for AI assistant startup

SAN FRANCISCO, March 27 (Reuters) - Two former Meta (META.O), opens new tab artificial intelligence executives have raised $15 million for Yutori, a startup that will develop AI personal assistants, the company said on Thursday. The round was led by Rob Toews at Radical Ventures, with participation from other investors like Felicis, "AI godmother" Fei-Fei Li, and Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean. San Francisco-based Yutori is part of a slew of AI startups creating autonomous agents, or systems that use AI to perform actions on their own. Executives in the field such as OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar have said such systems will dominate the AI agenda this year, as models have recently gotten to the point where they can carry out the longer action sequences necessary to execute tasks online without human oversight. "Right now there's a lot happening with chatbots, but chatbots are not doing things for you in a way that can take things off your plate," Yutori co-founder Devi Parikh told Reuters, saying the team has been working to redefine how users interact with autonomous AI agents, with a focus on improving efficiency for tasks ranging from online food orders to complex travel logistics. Yutori says it is focusing on post-training models to make them better at navigating the web, or adapting the base models to hone their performance in specific ways after they have already been "trained" on reams of generalized data. Post-training has emerged as a crucial step in the development of new reasoning models such as OpenAI's o1 and o3 models. Yutori's team includes Parikh, who led multimodal AI research at Meta, and Dhruv Batra, who led Meta's embodied AI research, a team developing models that robots could use to navigate the 3D physical world. Other team members include the multimodal post-training leads for Llama 3 and Llama 4, Meta's flagship open source models. Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco; Editing by Chris Reese Our Standards: The Thomson Reuters Trust Principles., opens new tab Suggested Topics:Artificial Intelligence Anna Tong Thomson Reuters Anna Tong is a correspondent for Reuters based in San Francisco, where she reports on the technology industry. She joined Reuters in 2023 after working at the San Francisco Standard as a data editor. Tong previously worked at technology startups as a product manager and at Google where she worked in user insights and helped run a call center. Tong graduated from Harvard University.

Former Meta Executives Secure $15 Mn For Yutori Venture

Former Meta AI executives Devi Parikh, Abhishek Das, and Dhruv Batra have secured $15 million in funding for their new San Francisco-based startup, Yutori. The company develops autonomous AI personal assistants capable of performing online tasks independently. The investment round was led by Rob Toews from Radical Ventures, with participation from Felicis Ventures, Google's DeepMind Chief Scientist Jeff Dean, and renowned AI researcher Fei-Fei Li. A closed beta of Yutori's first product will be launched this spring, and early adopters can join a waitlist here. "We're reimagining how people interact with the web -- building the entire stack to be agent-first, from training our own models to generative product interfaces," read their post on LinkedIn. "Ultimately, we want to give everyone an AI chief-of-staff." The company announced that the funds will accelerate the development of Yutori's agent-first approach, support the expansion of its engineering and design teams, and facilitate preparations for the product's launch. "Web agents will be one of the next great killer applications in AI. But despite all the hype, there are still no web agents out there today that actually work and that people use in their daily lives," said Rob Toews, partner at Radical Ventures. "Fundamental advances in post-training, in multimodal AI, in UX are still required in order to unlock this massive market opportunity." Yutori joins a rapidly growing group of startups working on autonomous AI systems designed to execute digital tasks without human intervention. The founding team includes tech leads behind Llama 3 and Llama 4, along with engineers and researchers from Meta, Google Gemini, Minion, Stanford, Carnegie Mellon University, and Georgia Tech.

Always Wanted a Personal Assistant? This AI Startup Wants to Help

Yutori is based in San Francisco, and just raised $15 million to help get it off the ground -- some of the money, Reuters notes, came from Google's DeepMind AI division. The startup is co-founded by Devi Parikh, who led "multimodal" AI research at Meta -- meaning AI technology that can process words, images, video and other forms of input, and generate relevant output in different formats -- and by Dhruv Batra. Reuters explains that Batra led Meta's "embodied AI" research, which was all about models that could go into robots that would move around in the real world. Combined, these two founders' expertise sounds well aligned with what's needed to build personal assistant AI, especially since other team members include leaders responsible for Meta's flagship Llama 3 and 4 AI models. The company's plan is to leverage the buzziest of AI innovations: agents. While chatbots are generally passive systems, waiting for you to "talk" to them before processing what you've said and then answering your query, agents are more sophisticated AI tools that have "agency" and can act on their own in a digital environment. Parikh explained the limitations of straightforward chatbots to the news service, noting "right now there's a lot happening with chatbots, but chatbots are not doing things for you in a way that can take things off your plate." Essentially, while chatbots are useful workplace tools for simple tasks like drafting copy to explain your business on your website, they can't do more complex tasks -- Parikh said his new team has already been working on agent AI systems that can tackle multi-level tasks like completing online food orders or arranging the logistics for "complex" travel plans.

Former Meta executives raise $15 million for AI assistant startup

The round was led by Rob Toews at Radical Ventures, with participation from other investors like Felicis, "AI godmother" Fei-Fei Li, and Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean. San Francisco-based Yutori is part of a slew of AI startups creating autonomous agents, or systems that use AI to perform actions on their own.Two former Meta artificial intelligence executives have raised $15 million for Yutori, a startup that will develop AI personal assistants, the company said on Thursday. The round was led by Rob Toews at Radical Ventures, with participation from other investors like Felicis, "AI godmother" Fei-Fei Li, and Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean. San Francisco-based Yutori is part of a slew of AI startups creating autonomous agents, or systems that use AI to perform actions on their own. Executives in the field such as OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar have said such systems will dominate the AI agenda this year, as models have recently gotten to the point where they can carry out the longer action sequences necessary to execute tasks online without human oversight. "Right now there's a lot happening with chatbots, but chatbots are not doing things for you in a way that can take things off your plate," Yutori co-founder Devi Parikh told Reuters, saying the team has been working to redefine how users interact with autonomous AI agents, with a focus on improving efficiency for tasks ranging from online food orders to complex travel logistics. Yutori says it is focusing on post-training models to make them better at navigating the web, or adapting the base models to hone their performance in specific ways after they have already been "trained" on reams of generalised data. Post-training has emerged as a crucial step in the development of new reasoning models such as OpenAI's o1 and o3 models. Yutori's team includes Parikh, who led multimodal AI research at Meta, and Dhruv Batra, who led Meta's embodied AI research, a team developing models that robots could use to navigate the 3D physical world. Other team members include the multimodal post-training leads for Llama 3 and Llama 4, Meta's flagship open source models.

Yutori Launches from Stealth with $15M Seed Funding to Build Consumer AI Assistants Capable of Everyday Tasks on the Web

Enter your email to get Benzinga's ultimate morning update: The PreMarket Activity Newsletter SAN FRANCISCO, March 27, 2025 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Yutori, the company building personal AI assistants that automate everyday digital tasks, today emerged from stealth with $15 million in seed funding led by Radical Ventures, with participation from Felicis and over a dozen stellar angel investors, including AI luminaries Fei-Fei Li and Jeff Dean, as well as prominent investors Elad Gil, Sarah Guo (Conviction) and Sandhya Venkatachalam (Axiom). Technology leaders such as Amjad Masad (Replit), Akshay Kothari (Notion), Oliver Cameron (Odyssey), Guillermo Rauch (Vercel), Soleio, and Logan Kilpatrick (Google AI Studio), among others, participated in the round. Yutori is pioneering an agent-first approach that unlocks accurate and reliable personal AI assistants capable of executing tasks across the web. "Productivity isn't about cramming more into your day -- it's about reclaiming your attention for what truly matters, and amplifying the outcomes of the time you give something. Yutori's mission is to build the best AI assistants to make space for the meaningful things in life," said Devi Parikh, co-CEO and co-founder of Yutori. Today's frontier AI models enable great chatbots but can't complete tasks autonomously. Yutori was founded to build personal AI assistants that are so reliable that they become the primary drivers of action on the web. These assistants will handle tasks and actions ranging from scheduling and communications to authentication and transactions, effectively coordinating users' lives -- creating a world where everyone has access to a team of digital assistants. This shift will completely redefine how people interact with the web, but to get there, an entirely new approach is required. Current agentic applications built around LLMs propagate errors over long sequences of actions involved in complex tasks, leading to degraded accuracies and as a result, a poor user experience. To make LLMs effective at completing tasks, Yutori is developing an agent-first approach - rather than an LLM-first approach - that unlocks performance across planning and execution. "When you're reimagining, from scratch, the interface between consumers and the web -- you can't be focused just on the AI models or just on the orchestration or application layers," said Abhishek Das, co-CEO and co-founder. "To raise both the floor and ceiling of human productivity on the web, you need to innovate across the stack in a coherent and tightly coupled way. That's what we're doing at Yutori." Yutori's approach focuses on post-training foundation models to be agentic, implementing a multi-agent system that can execute multiple tasks and sub-tasks in parallel, unlocking superhuman performance. The company is pushing the frontier of various post-training techniques including reinforcement learning, test-time search, and model-in-the-loop flywheels atop open-source models with commercial rights. Combined with tightly integrated generative product interfaces, these components enable Yutori to deliver more accurate and reliable AI assistants that consumers can trust. "What differentiates chatbots from agents is an external environment. The web is the ultimate digital environment -- if a task can be done digitally, it can be done via the web. But the web is dynamic, non-deterministic, and noisy; which means mistakes are inevitable and the key agentic skill is resilience," said Dhruv Batra, chief scientist and co-founder at Yutori. "Yutori's agent-first approach will unlock superhuman performance on this grand challenge." Yutori was founded by veteran AI researchers and close friends Devi Parikh, Dhruv Batra, and Abhishek Das with nearly 50 years of combined experience in AI research. Devi was most recently a senior director at Meta, leading multimodal generative AI research, supporting Llama 3, Make-A-Scene, Make-A-Video, and Emu, among other initiatives. Dhruv was a senior director at Meta, leading research in embodied agents that supported the multimodal assistant in the Ray-Ban Meta glasses and FAIR's Boston Dynamics' demos. Das' PhD thesis, Building Agents that can See, Talk, and Act, was recognized by a AAAI / ACM SIGAI doctoral dissertation runner-up award in 2020. The rest of the founding team includes the multimodal post-training tech leads of Llama 3 and Llama 4, as well as engineers and builders from Meta, Gemini, Minion, CMU, and Stanford. "Yutori's vision is to build a 'chief of staff for everyone' -- an intelligent, proactive partner that amplifies productivity and decision-making. That's the future we're commercializing, and it starts with solving the hard technical challenges today to deliver scalable, production-ready solutions tomorrow," said Rob Toews, partner at Radical Ventures. "The Yutori team believes that today's prevailing approach to creating AI agents will never fully work at scale, and that fundamental technology advances are required to make powerful AI agents a reality. Yutori is one of the few teams on the planet with the technical depth to build a truly production-ready AI agent." Yutori's seed funding will be used to accelerate the development of its agent-first approach, grow its engineering and design teams, and prepare for its product launch. This spring, early adopters will have the chance to participate in a closed beta of Yutori's first product offerings. To join the waitlist, visit yutori.com. About Yutori Yutori is reimagining how people interact with the web by bringing personal AI agents to consumers, making an "AI chief of staff" accessible to everyone. By rearchitecting the foundational technology that agents are built on with product and user experience in mind, Yutori has unlocked the promise of reliable and accurate AI agents which can be trusted with our everyday tasks. Its founding team consists of world-class AI researchers from Meta's FAIR and Llama teams, Google's Gemini and Assistant AI teams, Carnegie Mellon University, Georgia Tech and Stanford University. The company is backed by Radical Ventures and Felicis in addition to a host of AI experts and respected angel investors across technology and product. Media Contact press@yutori.com Market News and Data brought to you by Benzinga APIs

Meta Vets' Startup Yutori Raises $15 Million for AI Assistants | PYMNTS.com

Yutori, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup founded by Meta veterans, has raised $15 million. The new funding round, announced Thursday (March 27), accompanies the company's emergence from stealth and will help Yutori develop personalized AI assistants that it says can automate day-to-day tasks. "Today's frontier AI models enable great chatbots but can't complete tasks autonomously," the company said in a news release. "Yutori was founded to build personal AI assistants that are so reliable that they become the primary drivers of action on the web." According to the release, these assistants will handle things like scheduling and communications as well as authentication and transactions, "creating a world where everyone has access to a team of digital assistants." But to get to this point, the company said, a new approach is needed, as current agentic applications built around large language models (LLMs) can "propagate errors over long sequences of actions involved in complex tasks." To make LLMs effective at carrying out tasks, Yutori says it is developing an agent-first approach. "When you're reimagining, from scratch, the interface between consumers and the web -- you can't be focused just on the AI models or just on the orchestration or application layers," said Abhishek Das, co-CEO and co-founder. "To raise both the floor and ceiling of human productivity on the web, you need to innovate across the stack in a coherent and tightly coupled way." Das is joined by friends and fellow AI researchers Devi Parikh and Dhruv Batra, both veterans of Meta. The company says its three co-founders have a combined 50 years of experience in the AI field. The company's launch comes in the middle of an "AI gold rush," as PYMNTS wrote earlier this month, with firms charging increasing amounts for artificial intelligence features as the cost of running the technology grows. "As artificial intelligence transforms from a cool experiment to an essential business tool, we're witnessing a gold rush mentality in pricing," that report said. "While there are legitimate costs behind developing and running these systems, the current prices seem to include a healthy dose of 'what the market will bear' thinking." However, considering that, per PYMNTS Intelligence data, the same market is beginning to report positive returns on investments (ROI) on its GenAI spending, it might also be willing to bear the higher costs.

Ex-Meta Leaders Launch Yutori Following $15M Raise To Build AI Agents That Act as 'Chief of Staff'

Three former Meta employees who worked across the company's AI portfolio have raised $15 million to found Yutori. In a press release on Thursday, March 27, the new startup announced it will focus on building AI assistants that can act as a "chief of staff" for online tasks. Enhancing AI Usefulness Yutori was founded by three former Meta AI researchers: Abhishek Das, Devi Parikh, and Dhruv Batra. "Yutori was founded to build personal AI assistants that are so reliable that they become the primary drivers of action on the web," Thursday's release stated. To achieve this end, Yutori's founders are taking a full-stack approach to AI development. "To raise both the floor and ceiling of human productivity on the web, you need to innovate across the stack in a coherent and tightly coupled way," explained Co-Founder Abhishek Das. "You can't be focused just on the AI models or just on the orchestration or application layers," he added. Beyond Single-Model AI While Yutori hasn't revealed which models it plans to use for its AI agent platform, startups increasingly leverage a competitive field of available options. Rather than building everything from scratch, the company will follow in the footsteps of the viral Chinese AI agent Manus, which deploys Anthropic's Claude 3.5 Sonnet and fine-tuned versions of Alibaba's Qwen. Described by Yutori as a "multi-agent system," this approach has the advantage of pulling together the best solutions from different providers. For example, the platform may select one model for web navigation, one for translation and another for reasoning. Open-Source AI for Enhanced Functionality Despite promising the technology for over a year now, OpenAI and other major AI developers have been slow to deliver web-browsing capabilities. Even advanced platforms like OpenAI Deep Research occasionally trip up on simple tasks like downloading documents. On their own, the open-source models Yutori plans to work with aren't much better. But the startup said it plans to use various post-training techniques to improve their agentic functionality.

Former Meta executives raise $15 million for AI assistant startup

SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Two former Meta artificial intelligence executives have raised $15 million for Yutori, a startup that will develop AI personal assistants, the company said on Thursday. The round was led by Rob Toews at Radical Ventures, with participation from other investors like Felicis, "AI godmother" Fei-Fei Li, and Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean. San Francisco-based Yutori is part of a slew of AI startups creating autonomous agents, or systems that use AI to perform actions on their own. Executives in the field such as OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar have said such systems will dominate the AI agenda this year, as models have recently gotten to the point where they can carry out the longer action sequences necessary to execute tasks online without human oversight. "Right now there's a lot happening with chatbots, but chatbots are not doing things for you in a way that can take things off your plate," Yutori co-founder Devi Parikh told Reuters, saying the team has been working to redefine how users interact with autonomous AI agents, with a focus on improving efficiency for tasks ranging from online food orders to complex travel logistics. Yutori says it is focusing on post-training models to make them better at navigating the web, or adapting the base models to hone their performance in specific ways after they have already been "trained" on reams of generalized data. Post-training has emerged as a crucial step in the development of new reasoning models such as OpenAI's o1 and o3 models. Yutori's team includes Parikh, who led multimodal AI research at Meta, and Dhruv Batra, who led Meta's embodied AI research, a team developing models that robots could use to navigate the 3D physical world. Other team members include the multimodal post-training leads for Llama 3 and Llama 4, Meta's flagship open source models. (Reporting by Anna Tong in San Francisco; Editing by Chris Reese)