Sema4.ai Raises $30.5 Million to Bring Open Source Powered AI to Mission-Critical Enterprise Work

Acquires open source automation pioneer Robocorp to ignite a new era of intelligent agents for enterprise knowledge work

Sema4.ai is on a mission to build intelligent agents that transform how knowledge workers collaborate with AI. Led by open source pioneers and fueled by $30.5M from investors, including Benchmark, Mayfield, and Canvas Ventures, Sema4.ai is poised to become the leader in the $88B autonomous agent market. Today, the company announced the acquisition of open source automation innovator Robocorp, accelerating their position to build, run, and manage intelligent agents for the enterprise.

For the world’s billion knowledge workers, the promise of AI has yet to be realized. Large Language Models (LLMs) can summarize vast amounts of information and converse with humans but struggle to support and streamline the complex end-to-end workflows of knowledge workers. Existing enterprise automation solutions are limited to simple, repetitive, point-to-point tasks because they lack the fundamental competencies for knowledge work, such as the intelligence and reasoning to manage ambiguity, and the ability to adapt to changing enterprise context and take real-time action.

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Sema4.ai enables meaningful human-AI collaboration, supporting and streamlining the complex decision-making of knowledge workers. Customers can now leverage the power of LLMs safely and securely across their most mission-critical workflows — moving from low-level, low-value automation to native, ground-up, AI-based agents.

Sema4.ai’s founding team is made up of proven industry leaders Rob Bearden, Ram Venkatesh, Suds Menon, and Paul Codding, with deep expertise and decades of experience spanning data management, distributed systems, application development, and open source from companies such as Cloudera, Docker, Hortonworks, SpringSource, and JBoss. With this acquisition, Robocorp founder and CEO Antti Karjalainen joins the founding team, adding further depth of experience in open source and automation.

“Our founders each have a proven track record of building significant enterprise software businesses,” said Rob Bearden, CEO of Sema4.ai. “Our acquisition of Robocorp was borne out of a deep conviction that intelligence without action is incomplete, and action without intelligence is, at best, non-strategic. Together, we’re well-positioned to build category-defining intelligent agents that connect context to action, changing how work gets done in the enterprise.”

“Benchmark’s relationship with Rob Bearden has spanned 20+ years of open source success stories with over $2B in current product revenue — from JBoss to, more recently, Cloudera,” said Peter Fenton, General Partner at Benchmark. “The pillars of his leadership, open source AI, and the agent technology of Robocorp will allow major enterprises to safely build, run, and manage paradigm-shifting AI applications, with the potency of an open source foundation that will only grow in strength with time.”

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“As a People First investor, it is an honor to partner with the experienced founding team behind Sema4.ai as they pursue a transformational GenAI opportunity to accelerate the $88 billion AI economy,” said Navin Chaddha, Managing Partner at Mayfield. “Our investment in Sema4.ai reflects our belief that plumbing layers drive enterprise adoption during paradigm shifts. In the age of AI, we think of this as ‘cognitive plumbing,’ as models/middleware/tools, data, infrastructure, and semis/systems automate cognitive tasks to unlock new possibilities.”

Sema4.ai also announced a community release of a new AI Actions framework that integrates directly with LangChain and OpenAI.

With Sema4.ai’s Python-based AI Actions framework, teams can create intelligent agents that act against their enterprise systems using LLMs. Intelligent agents transform LLMs from information processors to active participants in enterprise systems, enabling completely new and practical use cases for Generative AI.

“We see Python as the language of choice for developing intelligent agents, and that’s why we expanded the Robocorp platform to focus on ‘automation as code,'” said Antti Karjalainen, founder and CEO at Robocorp and co-founder of Sema4.ai. “Our new integration with LangChain makes it possible for AI developers to use LLMs to take direct action against their enterprise applications and data, closing the loop from conversation to action to get real work done.”

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