Exclusive: This $100 million startup wants to give companies AI employees

At Anything AI, a San Francisco-based startup, a team operates much like a traditional company's organizational chart, but with a twist – none of the employees are human. Emma investigates reported bugs, Otis forecasts launch dates, Clementine manages the company's brand, Tilda briefs the CEO daily, and JB is the office manager.

Anything's founders, Dhruv Amin and Marcus Lowe, former Google product leads, created the platform to give non-technical people a way to build AI-powered apps. The company raised $11 million in a financing round with a $100 million valuation, led by Footwork, Uncork Capital, Bessemer Venture Partners, and M13. Over a million people have used Anything to build apps, such as project trackers and customer relationship management platforms.

The company's latest venture, Skydive, allows users to create custom AI "teammates" by describing the role or browsing through a catalog of agent templates. These AI agents are always on, available when human employees are off, and have their own phone numbers and iMessage capabilities. The team has built over 150 agents, with about 10 essential to operations.

The company's human employees operate these agents in teams of 10 to 15 each. Amin emphasizes that these agents are not quite human; they have human names and avatar appearances but lack the nuances of human communication. While the transition to AI agents has been mostly positive, there have been occasional mistakes, such as an agent misreading a database calculation or drafting emails without proper review. To mitigate issues, users must set clear boundaries with agents and specify task limitations.