AI firm Adept gets $350 million in Series B round from General Catalyst, Spark Capital, others

Adept, an artificial intelligence (AI) startup, has raised $350 million as a part of its Series B round of funding from General Catalyst and co-led by Spark Capital, according to a statement. Companies like Addition, Greylock, Atlassian Ventures, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Workday Ventures, Caterina Fake, Frontiers Capital, PSP Growth, SV Angel and A.Capital, and others also took part in the fresh funding round.

“Adept’s language models are geared towards creating ‘actions’ instead of generating text. This automation of actions enables an enterprise’s knowledge workers to be a lot more efficient and effective,” said Deep Nishar, managing director at General Catalyst.

Adept was founded by former Google researchers. It is an artificial intelligence research and product lab which creates software process automation for developers. Recently the company's co-founders Niki Parmar and Ashish Vaswani left the business. David Luan is the current co-founder and CEO of Adept.

Adept will use the Series B funding to launch its initial artificial intelligence products, train models, and expand talent. Last year in April, the company raised $65 million in Series A round of funding.

General Catalyst is a venture capital firm that provides early-stage and growth equity investments. While, US-based VC firm Spark Capital invests in consumer, commerce, fintech, software, frontier and media sectors, with a focus on technology startups in the media, entertainment and mobile segments.

Despite the funding slowdown in India, companies are managing to raise funds. Last week, digital payments and financial services unicorn PhonePe received $200 million in additional funding from Walmart at a pre-money valuation of $12 billion. PhonePe, one of India's largest fintech platforms, will utilise the money to build and scale new businesses like insurance, wealth management, lending, stockbroking, ONDC-based shopping and account aggregators. The company competes with Google Pay and Paytm.

Another D2C lifestyle startup Zouk had raised $3 million in funding led by its existing investor Stellaris Venture Partners last week.