Adept, Founded by the Inventors of the "Transformer," Raises $65M and Exits Stealth

AI startup Adept announced it had raised $65 million in a Series A round led by Greylock Partners and Addition, officially launching out of stealth mode. Its co-founders include Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar (both formerly of Google Brain), authors of the original Transformer paper “Attention Is All You Need,” alongside David Luan, OpenAI’s former VP of Engineering.

Details

• Founding team: CEO David Luan, Chief Scientist Ashish Vaswani, and CTO Niki Parmar. Vaswani and Parmar are two of the eight co-authors of the Transformer paper
• Vision: The company set a goal of building “a foundation model that can use every software tool, API, and web app,” envisioning a future where existing software like Airtable, Photoshop, Tableau, and Twilio could be operated through natural-language commands
• Investors: Alongside Greylock Partners and Addition, backers included Root Ventures and notable angel investors such as Scott Belsky (founder of Behance), Howie Liu (founder of Airtable), and Andrej Karpathy (then head of Tesla Autopilot)
• Positioning: Adept described itself not as just another chatbot company but as a research-and-development product lab aiming for “general intelligence” that lets people and computers collaborate creatively

What happened next

Just five months after exiting stealth, in September 2022 Adept unveiled its first model, “ACT-1,” drawing attention with demos of it actually operating a browser. In March 2023 the company raised an additional $350 million in a Series B — though the road ahead would not be smooth.