Last year, Graft launched its AI development platform in beta, intending to democratize AI development for all companies, regardless of their size or engineering resources. Today, the startup announced a $10 million seed investment and is inviting companies to request access to its platform, gradually expanding its services to a larger number of companies.
Adam Oliner, Graft's co-founder and CEO, conceived the idea for the company while leading AI operations at Slack. He recognizes the growing interest in AI, particularly stimulated by ChatGPT, but he also notes a significant gap between toying with ChatGPT and developing a production-ready AI application.
"The fascinating AI gadgets aren't designed for production, and the established platforms are mostly inaccessible to non-experts. Hence, Graft aims to bridge this market gap with a production-grade, user-friendly AI platform that’s designed for everyone," Oliner explained.
Despite the advances of models like ChatGPT, Oliner believes that developing AI applications has not gotten any simpler. He points out the complexities of these models, their large size, and the new ethical, compliance, and privacy-related issues they present.
To simplify the process, Graft has introduced several apps allowing customers to get started without building something from scratch. "We're introducing apps, which are template-based use cases that can be easily converted into full-scale production applications using your data," he added.
Their current offerings include visual search and identifying customer champions. Oliner mentions that starting is as simple as creating a Graft account, choosing a predefined template, and pointing to your data. Graft then takes care of the infrastructure required to run the application.
The recent $10 million investment was led by Radical Ventures, with participation from GV. This funding raises Graft's total capital to $14.5 million, following a $4.5 million pre-seed round raised last year.
