As Cohere and Writer mine ‘Live AI’, Pathway joins the pack with a $10M round.

As large enterprises grapple with how to integrate AI into their infrastructure and processes, they have encountered a problem: Generative AI needs to have memory and its training data must be updated regularly to have any practical use. This area is now called ‘Live AI’ and many startups are active in the space, including Cohere and Author. Another, Pathway, recently raised a 10 million seed round to build live AI systems that, the company says, think and learn in real time like humans do.

The round was led by TQ Ventures, with participation from Kadmos, Innovo, Market One Capital, Id4 and angel investors. Another investor in Pathway includes Lukasz Kaiser, co-writer of Transformers and the main researcher behind GPT o1 from OpenAI.

Pathway’s offering includes what it calls ‘infrastructure components’ that enable living AI systems, fed by structured and unstructured data, meaning business AI platforms can make decisions with up-to-date information. Clients so far include NATO and La Poste, the French post office.

Zuzanna Stamirowska, Co-Founder and CEO of Pathway, told TechCrunch on the phone: “The way deep learning and LLM assistants work, is that you take training data and train models. But the question is, how to deal with knowledge, how to deal with memory? Currently an LLM is like a brilliant student on the first day of their career, given a book to read. But they can’t really memorize it. Also, it’s not live, it’s static. “

To address this, he said Pathway “enables developers to build a pipeline where they can feed live data into AI systems. We currently do it during the introductory phase when building LLM applications or Gen AI applications. “

Stamirowska — who is relocating to Menlo Park, California — assembled an impressive, high-tech team to achieve the startup’s goals. Its founders are CSO Adrian Kosowski and CTO Jan Chorowski, who previously worked with the latter Nobel Prize winner in physics and the “Godfather of AI”, Geoff Hinton. Stamirowska herself is the author of a modern predictive model of the complex network of maritime trade, published by the US Academy of Sciences.

“The company started with an idea that popped into my head on a sunny morning in Chicago,” he said. “I was there accompanying my friend to a computer science conference… So, I took my laptop and started writing to people in my network about how to take this forward. I still remember the taste of the coffee at that time.”

I asked him where he sees Pathway compared to other startups in the space? “In the use cases of GenAI engineering and information management, Cohere and Author appear alongside us in the latest Gartner Quadrants,” he said. “Though in business deals, we often meet with Palantir for AI transformation tenders, even though it’s less product-focused than we are.”

Commenting in a statement, Schuster Tanger, Co-Managing Partner and Co-founder at TQ Ventures, said: “Zuzanna and the team at Pathway have extensive experience and expertise in one of the most exciting areas of business today… to say the least, the response from the engineering community has been overwhelming. “