Sail Research has raised $80m to make AI agents cheaper to run. The startup, founded by ex-Apple and ex-NVIDIA engineers, says it can serve the tokens agents burn through at up to 10 times lower cost.
AI agents are hungry. Leave one running for hours and it can chew through billions of tokens on a single task. That gets expensive fast, and the bill is what stops many agents from leaving the lab. A new startup called Sail Research thinks it can fix the economics.
Sail has raised $80m in combined seed and Series A funding at a $450m valuation. Sequoia led the seed round and Kleiner Perkins led the Series A. Redpoint Ventures, Theory Ventures, Vine Ventures, CRV, A* and Abstract Ventures also joined.
The angel list reads like its own headline. It includes John Hennessy, the chairman of Alphabet, Lip-Bu Tan, the chief executive of Intel, and Tri Dao, the chief scientist at Together AI. The San Francisco company also drew angels from Anthropic, OpenAI, SpaceX and Thinking Machines.
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