Arcade is an emerging AI agent infrastructure startup founded by former Okta executive Alex Salazar and former Redis engineer Sam Partee. Recently, Arcade successfully received a $12 million financing from Laude Ventures. Laude Ventures is a new fund founded in 2024 by Andy Konwinski, co-founder of Perplexity.
This financing is the first publicly announced investment by Laude Ventures. Pete Sonsini, a partner at the fund, said their portfolio includes well-known companies such as Databricks, Anyscale and Perplexity.
Not the first time Alex Salazar started his business, he sold his identity verification API startup Stormpath to Okta in 2017 and served as vice president of products at Okta for many years. Sam Partert focuses on building applications based on large language model (LLM) and has participated in some key open source projects such as LangChain and LlamaIndex.
After seeing the release of ChatGPT3.5, Salazar realized the potential of the future and decided to start an AI agency, so he founded Arcade in February 2024. However, they soon discovered that there were many problems with AI agents in actual operation.
Salazar mentioned that they tried to build a site reliability agent with the goal of competing with companies like Datadog, but most agents have very limited practical capabilities. The two founders encountered difficulties in the development process, mainly because many agents use LLMs trained on public data and cannot access private data, which makes them unable to complete the necessary tasks.
So, Salazar and Patt decided to build Arcade into the infrastructure for AI agents, just as Okta once did in the SaaS cloud services field. They built a tool call platform designed to help agents get the services and data they need.
During the demonstration of the agent, the customer is not very interested in the agent itself, but is more concerned about how to make the agent work effectively. Ultimately, they decided not to focus on the agent itself, but to sell their underlying tool calling platform.
Arcade's technology allows each agent to have the same permissions as the user and access the same applications and data. Arcade supports usage-based pricing and subscription models. It integrates OAuth and can handle authentication of thousands of SaaS services and websites, while providing secure token management that prevents LLM from directly accessing credentials.
Sancini said that as an investor, he has always been paying attention to founders with a deep technical background, and Arcade fits this direction. He stressed that many AI entrepreneurs focus on compelling LLM applications, and he values infrastructure-level opportunities, which is why Arcade stands out.
Key points:
Arcade successfully received $12 million in financing and is committed to improving the efficiency of AI agents.
The founder of the company has worked in well-known companies such as Okta and Redis, and has rich industry experience.
Arcade's technology ensures that the agents and users have the same access rights, improving the security and functionality of the application.