OpenAI’s Sam Altman invests in Indian-origin teenagers’ AI startup

San Francisco, Oct 4

ChatGPT developer OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman has invested in an artificial intelligence (AI) startup, founded by two Indian-origin teenagers Aryan Sharma and Ayush Pathak in the Silicon valley in the US.

The startup Induced AI, founded this year, has raised $2.3 million in its seed-funding round led by Altman and VC firm Peak XV, along with “an incredible set of investors”.

“We let anyone create virtual AI workers that can automate the execution of workflows on a browser in the cloud with human-like reasoning,” Sharma said on Wednesday.

Other angel investors include Balaji Srinivasan (former CTO Coinbase), Julian Weisser (Co-founder, On Deck), Tyler Willis (Co-founder, Unsupervised), Cory Levy (Z Fellows), Nakul Gupta (ex-Coinbase), Ankur Nandwani (Founder, ZetaChain), Sudarshan Sridharan (Founder, Pipeline), Rahul Agarwal (Co-founder, Valent), Enzo Coglitore, Daksh Miglani (Co-founder, Valent), Rahul Rai, Sanat Kapur (Dragonfly Capital), Kyler Wang and Karan Dalal.

Induced AI allows automation of workflows that require real-time reasoning or dynamic judgement (filtering leads, cross-referencing documents, memory.etc) -- things that are hard and painful to set up with traditional browser automation/RPA.

Automation of browser tasks has so far been restricted to deterministic and ruleset-based workflows that are run on old RPA (Robotic Process Automation) software.

“Our automated workflows run on a purpose-built browser environment that is designed specially for autonomous navigation. Web interactions, authentication, reasoning, memory -- all are embedded in this underlying browser layer,” informed Sharma.

Induced AI is also part of AI Grant’s Batch 2.

“We’re thrilled to have Nat Friedman (former CEO, Github) and Daniel Gross (ex-YC and Pioneer) join us as well,” according to the startup.

The startup has taken an infrastructure-centric approach, and instead of running on a standard browser, "we've purpose-built a browser that is designed for running automated workflows".