AUI AI Startup Lands 20 Million For Hybrid Model

AUI Secures Major Funding in SAFE Round

Augmented Intelligence (AUI), an innovative AI company founded in 2017 by Ohad Elhelo and Ori Cohen, has successfully raised $20 million in a Simple Agreement for Future Equity (SAFE) round. This latest investment sets a significant valuation cap of $750 million for the startup, with the final valuation for new investors to be established during the next funding phase.

The round saw participation from existing investors, including eGateway Ventures and a consortium from the Israeli fund New Era Capital. This new injection of capital brings AUI's total funding to approximately $60 million. This follows a previous $10 million round raised about a year ago, which was based on a $350 million valuation cap, highlighting the company's rapid growth and increasing investor confidence.

The Hybrid Approach to Conversational AI

AUI operates with a team of 45 employees spread across its offices in Tel Aviv and New York. The company is pioneering a unique artificial intelligence platform that integrates two different AI methodologies. It combines the power of generative AI, which excels at interpreting user language and formulating natural responses, with a symbolic reasoning component that is specifically engineered for decision-making and logical operations.

Co-founder Ohad Elhelo explained that this hybrid model gives AUI a distinct advantage. It enables the platform to effectively manage structured, task-oriented conversations—such as booking a hotel room or opening a new bank account. These are areas where conventional large language models (LLMs) like ChatGPT often struggle, as they are primarily designed for open-ended dialogue rather than transactional, multi-step processes.

Solving LLM Weaknesses and Reducing Costs

The key value proposition of AUI's technology is its ability to overcome the limitations of standard generative AI while offering significant cost benefits. Elhelo noted that AUI’s symbolic model is already being utilized by several Fortune 500 companies, proving its effectiveness in real-world enterprise environments.

A major advantage lies in its cost efficiency. By using a symbolic reasoning core, AUI's platform eliminates the need to train massive, resource-intensive models from scratch for every task. This approach leads to substantially lower operational costs compared to solutions that rely solely on large language models.

Strategic Partnerships and Future Growth

Looking ahead, AUI is actively pursuing a strategic go-to-market partnership with Google. The collaboration aims to deploy AUI's advanced conversational agents in the cloud, targeting a broad market that includes consumer companies, retailers, and the e-commerce sector.

Elhelo articulated AUI's long-term vision: to develop a single, powerful model capable of serving numerous clients at scale. This strategy contrasts with the common industry practice of creating custom, bespoke solutions for individual customers. The capital from this new round will be used to expand the company's New York operations and strategically position it for its next phase of commercial expansion and growth.

The tech funding landscape remains active with other notable raises. For more insights, you can read about:

• CyberRidge's $16M Series A for photonic encryption
• Reflectiz's $22 million Series B to combat silent cyber risks
• Wild Moose's $7 million Seed to prevent AWS-style outages