AI is swiftly rewiring the way people work, but an outsize amount of this workplace revolution has so far been confined to Fortune 500-style companies. Ciridae has raised $20 million in seed funding on the promise of bringing AI to the many U.S. businesses that don’t hold quarterly earnings calls.
The funding round was led by Accel, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst. Its co-founders, former a16z partner Jack Soslow and former Apple and Tenyx machine learning lead Jack Weissenberger, see AI adoption as an existential issue for the mid-market companies their startup is focused on servicing.
“Many of the businesses most exposed to AI risk [are] least equipped to do this rearchitecture themselves. These are businesses in home services, construction, industrial distribution—the businesses that compose our real economy—and if they don’t do it, they will be out-competed and atrophy over time,” Soslow told Fortune in an interview.
Ciridae’s business is part of a larger trend where firms are looking to AI to streamline and improve existing businesses. The investment and holding firm Long Lake, for instance, just purchased a corporate travel platform for $6.3 billion in hopes of using AI to modernize the business. Capitalizing on the investor interest in these kinds of AI-led transformations, Ciridae will initially focus its services on companies backed by private equity.
