- Former Meta AI executives have raised $15 million for Yutori, a startup developing AI personal assistants to automate online tasks.
- Yutori focuses on post-training AI models to improve autonomous agents, with backing from leading investors, including Fei-Fei Li and Jeff Dean.
Two former Meta artificial intelligence (AI) executives have raised $15 million for Yutori, a startup developing AI personal assistants. The company announced the funding on Thursday.
The investment was led by Rob Toews of Radical Ventures, with participation from Felicis, AI researcher Fei-Fei Li, and Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean.
San Francisco-based Yutori is among a wave of AI startups working on autonomous agents—AI systems designed to complete tasks independently. OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar has noted that such systems are becoming a key focus in AI, as recent advancements enable models to handle complex sequences of actions without human supervision.
"Right now there's a lot happening with chatbots, but chatbots are not doing things for you in a way that can take things off your plate," Yutori co-founder Devi Parikh said.
She also mentioned that the team is working on improving how users interact with autonomous AI to streamline tasks such as online food orders and travel planning.
Yutori focuses on post-training AI models, refining their ability to navigate the web and adapt beyond their initial training data. This process has become crucial in advancing AI reasoning models like OpenAI’s o1 and o3.
The startup is led by Parikh, former head of multimodal AI research at Meta, and Dhruv Batra, who previously led Meta’s embodied AI research, which developed models for robotic navigation. Other team members include specialists in post-training for Meta’s Llama 3 and Llama 4, the company’s open-source AI models.
Edited by Harshajit Sarmah
