Just a few years ago, one of the hottest topics in enterprise software was “robotic process automation” (RPA). It doesn’t seem like those services, which attempted to automate many repetitive business processes, ever lived up to their promise. However, the rise of generative AI may be the missing key to building these types of systems.
Based in Seattle tectonic is one of the new startups in this space. The company, which combines GenAI with more traditional token methods, comes out of stealth today and announces its $10 million seed funding round led by Point72 Ventures and Madrona Ventures.
The idea here is to allow users to work with GenAI agents using natural language to create workflow automation. One area the company highlights is quoting and renewals, which often involve a series of manual tasks that are difficult to automate because each company has its own, and often dynamic, processes for them.
Tektonic was co-founded by Nic Surpatanu, who previously held leadership roles at Tanium, UiPath and Microsoft. “Last year, generative AI emerged and I realized that it unlocks some software scenarios that were impossible before,” Surpatanu said. “[Based on] What I learned at UiPath and Microsoft, I know how far you can push traditional automation.”
What’s perhaps even more important, he said, is that he believes generative AI can’t be treated like a magic box. “You have to combine it with symbolic methods. You have to combine it with more traditional software if you want to get the most out of it,” he said.
Generative AI, Surpatanu maintains, can bring a degree of context adaptability and an understanding of user intent to these systems that wasn’t really possible before and something that RPA often struggles with. With these older tools, any major UI changes will break scheduled automation. And once you create a set of automations, you must commit to maintaining them.
AI also enables the extraction of semantic entities and their mapping based on user intent.
“Our focus[…] won’t make it 100% flexible for short. I’m not stating that. But I am introducing enough flexibility to cover a much broader set of scenarios than was possible before,” Surpatanu said. He noted that he doesn’t believe current models are reliable enough to power fully autonomous agents yet, so humans will, at least for the time being, remain in the loop. But, he also emphasized, if a tool like Tektonic can take the current state of the art of automating 50% of a process to 80%, that in itself would be a big step forward.
On the technical side, Tektonic uses a combination of basic models and open models for the extraction of lower-level entities and actions.
“Instead of doing manual work across multiple applications, sales reps should partner with AI-powered agents who understand their processes and get things done so they can spend more time working with customers,” write Steve Singh, Ted Kummert and Palak Goel of Madrona at the company’s announcement today. “The emergence of generative AI models with the ability to reason across data silos within applications and orchestrate tasks allows us to rethink process automation by taking it to places it has never been before.”
Tektonic is still in its infancy and the team is currently working with several design partners to test and develop their system. “Fast forward, within three to five years, we will be a SaaS company. You will come in and we will connect to the APIs of your systems,” Surpatanu said. For now, however, getting started with Tektonic requires installing the system as a container in a company’s virtual private cloud.
