Arcade, an AI agent infrastructure startup founded by former Okta executive Alex Salazar and former Redis engineer Sam Partee, has raised $12 million from Laude Ventures.
Laude is a new fund launched in 2024 Confused Co-founder Andy Konwinski, a computer scientist at UC Berkeley Co-created data map.
This is not Laude’s only cheque to cut. Laude co-founder and general partner Pete Sonsini told TechCrunch that it was the first to announce publicly. Sonsini has been known for years in the NEA, where he led early stage investments in Databricks, Anyscale and confusion.
As for Sara Salle, he is a repetitive founder. He landed after Okta Sell his authentication API startup Stormpath to the company In 2017. He worked as a VP construction product at Okta for the next few years. According to Arcade, Partee has been building LLM-based applications and has contributed to some key open source projects such as Langchain and Llamaindex.
When Salazar saw Chatgpt 3.5 debut, he saw the future, and his next startup idea: an AI agency. Arcade was established in February 2024.
Then he and the party soon discovered AI agents don’t really work.
“We are trying to build a website reliability agent that will compete with. [companies] Like a data dog,” Salazar said. They didn’t do much.”
Salazar and Partee have been “beating our head to wall” in an attempt to get their agents to connect with other services and get the data they need to work.
One reason they found is that many agents use public data-trained LLMs, rather than private data. For example, they can talk about product features but cannot confirm that the order has been delivered.
The two decided what Arcade would do for AI agents, what Okta did for SaaS Cloud Services once. The founders have built a tool name platform for their website reliability agents.
“People were so surprised when we showed them the demo of that agent,” Sarasal said. They wanted to know how to make an agent really work.
“End of the day, we just looked at each other and said…Why are we not just stopping with the agent and selling the basic tool platform?” Saraza said.
Enter Arcade, which can help each agent gain access to the same privileges as it assists the workers or the work role it plays. Arcades can be obtained through usage-based pricing or subscription.
Arcade integrates with Oauth, so it can handle authentication of thousands of SaaS services and websites. Salazar said it also adopts an intermediary that provides secure token management to prevent the LLMS itself from obtaining these credentials.
When Sonsini, who supported Salazar with Stormpath, heard that the founder was opening a new startup, he reached out and wanted to come in.
“We are very focused on founders of the super technology type, so we have very limited partners with researchers,” Sonsini said.
Many AI startup founders are focused on “shiny objects” around LLM, such as agents, “My background is a lower level of infrastructure that can build a billion-dollar business,” Sonsini said. The arcade “falls in that space”.
