Scale AI’s former CTO launches AI agent that could solve big data’s biggest problem

Isotopes AI got here out of stealth on Thursday with a wholesome $20 million seed spherical.

It gives an AI agent to unravel an issue that information analytics merchandise have struggled with for many years: The individuals who know tips on how to run the massive information infrastructure are usually not those who really want to make use of the info.

With LLMs, enterprise managers can ask questions of their information in pure language. Isotopes’ agent, Aidnn, can present solutions and draft advanced planning paperwork, gathering information from wherever it’s saved, like finance apps, ERP, CRM, and cloud storage.

There are numerous agentic enterprise analytics choices on the market, however Isotopes’ co-founders have a singular pedigree. Their product is so subtle, the startup has already utilized for 10 patents, co-founder CEO Arun Murthy informed Trendster.

Simply over 20 years in the past, when Murthy was in his mid-20s, he labored at Yahoo on the crew that constructed an open supply venture known as Hadoop. Hadoop spurred the preliminary Huge Knowledge frenzy of the 2010s. 

In 2011, Yahoo spun it out into an organization known as Hortonworks, with Murthy as co-founder and chief product officer. Simply 4 years after launch, Hortonworks went public. However the rise of recent cloud storage tech took its toll on Hadoop’s market, and Hortonworks finally merged with its greatest rival, Cloudera. The merged firm was taken personal in 2021 after famed activist investor Carl Icahn received concerned.

Murthy went to Cloudera for a couple of years throughout that turmoil, managing about 200 folks. But, he says, even there he noticed the age-old information entry drawback. He remembers quarterly convention calls with Wall Avenue analysts grilling execs on working particulars. 

They couldn’t all the time reply as a result of they didn’t have entry to the info. “It was embarrassing,” he admits now. “We have been a giant information firm promoting this.”

In 2021, he left that job with no actual plan on what to do subsequent, and a VC launched him to Scale AI’s Alexandr Wang. After a couple of chats with Wang and a little bit of consulting work, Murthy joined Scale as chief expertise officer. 

It was like “getting a PhD at Scale,” he describes. “Understanding what drives these fashions and tips on how to enhance them.” 

However when his previous buddy from Hortonworks, Prasanth Jayachandran, known as him, the 2 determined to do their very own AI startup. They persuaded their third-cofounder, Gopal Vijayaraghavan, additionally from the Hortonworks days, to hitch them and in late 2024 based Isotopes. Their seed spherical was led by Vab Goel at NTTVC. (Goel was beforehand at NorWest Ventures.)

The founders’ backgrounds has allowed them to construct an agent that may discover information from wherever it’s saved (be it Salesforce or Snowflake), however then additionally clear the info. The agent additionally maintains loads of context reminiscence to be helpful for advanced duties.

“That is far past a easy chatbot,” Murthy mentioned. For instance, if the crew is asking Aidnn to draft a report on month-to-month recurring income traits, “the info that you just wish to chat with really doesn’t exist, no less than the shape that you have to chat with. It’s a multistep plan, a really advanced plan: extract metadata, learn the info, clear and normalize, be a part of the info, prorate income, combination.”

The agent additionally exhibits its steps, reasoning, assumptions, and factors to anomalies within the information. It would even make suggestions on tips on how to proceed. Isotopes additionally guarantees that enterprise clients can deploy with out sharing any of their information to the AI mannequin makers powering the agent.

Nonetheless, as subtle as Isotopes could also be, the startup faces loads of competitors. Incumbents like Salesforce’s Tableau already provide brokers (amid Salesforce’s main AI agent push), and loads of different startup founders with spectacular pedigrees are out there, too, reminiscent of WisdomAI.