Ingest raises $21M Series A led by Altimeter to build durable execution infrastructure for AI agents

we have Tony from Inest joining the stream. He's in the reream waiting room. We'll bring him in. Welcome to the stream. How you doing? Welcome. Hey, thank you so much for having me. How's it going? It's going great. Uh, kick us off with just a brief introduction on yourself and then give us the news. Cool. Yeah.

Uh, I'm Tony, one of the founders and CEO of inest. com. I'm here just to talk about our series A without submitter. We uh, we closed the 21 mil round with them. Thanks. Thanks. Yeah. Uh, they're great people.

Jamman's Jam's a really really smart guy and uh, we also had the follow on and the continued investment from Andre Notable and and a four, which is which is great. So, um, yeah, fun times, you know. Love it. Uh, Jordy, you want to hit that? Let's talk about I I'll wait till the end. Okay, we'll hit the gun.

Let's talk about, uh, what the company does. What are you guys up to? Yeah. Yeah. So, we are we're we're an async execution platform, driven execution. We, uh, we we allow you to build workflows as step functions. Um, make it really, really easy so that you abstract all of the infrastructure.

Uh, essentially write a couple different things like step, step, step. We make sure they execute durably. um you can write any code in those step functions. Um and a lot of people use this for AI and AI agents because uh turns out that you know that's a that's a really big thing as you've heard all the time. Yeah.

How did you pick the level of abstraction that you're operating at? There's so many other like there's companies that they just do the inference or they just do fine-tuning or they or they go an even higher level and they sell a complete SAS solution with an agent wrapped in it.

Uh you're in this kind of in between zone. uh how did you land there? Do you see yourself moving up and or down the stack? It feels like such a flexible time right now in the market. Yeah, super flexible. Super flexible.

Um maybe I'll talk about the origin stories and I'll talk about the um so I used to run engineering for a healthcare company and healthcare is like dude healthcare is so hard. I would not recommend it. Really nice to help people but the engineering is crazy. Super workflow driven.

Um and it would take months to build out what should take days. you know, when a patient does this, if they don't do something in a certain amount of time, X, Y, and Z. And so those are those are workflows.

Um, so we initially built the SDK to make it really easy for your product engineer that might be full stack to build these workflows without mocking around with infrastructure. So you don't want to have to create workers. You don't want to have to create cues. You don't want to terraform new new things on CFKA.

You just want to write some code, deploy it in your existing codebase, and have it work basically in a minute.

And that like that level of abstraction is really key because I think if everyone has access to the same models and if everyone has access to the same sort of compute, what really matters now is how fast you can iterate on your product, how fast you can actually build the experiences on top of those models.

And it turns out that like yeah, you can build agents for other people, but this particular layer that that executes the AI that runs the workflows is really tough and you have to have it done right in order to iterate fast.

And so it's sort of this interesting sort of layer on top of the infrastructure that allows people to build and execute. So um that was kind of always the plan.

I think like one of the things that we talked about is you know just infrastructureless infrastructure so that you can just write code, deploy it and have it work which is um sort of a I think like a modern version of what Terraform should be. Yeah.

What what categories of agents are you most bullish on today and over the next year? We just Yeah. Yeah. Because because you know again on on the consumer agent side felt like deep research was the first breakout killer app consumer agent.

Before that everyone was excited about agents but weren't necessarily daily even weekly active users of a lot of them. Yeah. It's interesting and you were just talking about with with the with the person number four, you know, like the whole stuff, right? Right.

Forward deployed stuff and you see a lot of like support I think like for the day-to-day things that everyone uses internally, you know, like it's kind of the the stuff that you're all probably using dayto-day cla that sort of stuff is like killer, you know. I use it for tests.

It doesn't do distributed systems well enough for us right now, but um it's pretty it's pretty good. Um, and then like in the future, you know, I think it's really interesting to see people craft experiences inside their own products.

Um, you know, like Decagon and whatnot have done that for support for some time, which is super interesting. And I'm really really curious where we go with context engineering and how people can build their own custom agents which are essentially workflows.

So I like day-to-day for sure the average the average ones that people are using, but like you take Nano Banana, you throw that in a workflow and you have this really sick agent experience on top of that. It's like it's pretty good.

The world is changing pretty fast and it feels like everything will end up becoming this which is craziness. Uh how does how's Soundcloud using this? I think that's an interesting case study you have there.

I'd love to understand more about how a company that just does you know I think of it as like a music player library of music. Uh like like what's their strategy? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, uh music is tough. Uh it turns out that every industry has a lot of depth that you wouldn't realize when you go into it, you know.

um everything from like making sure that there's no um I guess piracy, making sure that there's no terrorism, making sure that if people want to produce their albums and send it out to Spotify, iTunes, that entire music distribution is also kind of insane. Um it requires a lot of workflows too.

So there's a lot of stuff that you have to do to operationalize music, either distribution, production, content. Um and essentially they were trying to hack together this for for 9 months. Um, the CTO at the time found us somehow and he had a lot of stuff up and running within a week.

Um, and their time to production was like insane from like 9 months to 1 week. They ended up pushing us out to production relatively quickly within like the first few months. And uh I think I think they were live in maybe maybe like the first 6 weeks. Um, so they use this for a ton of their stuff.

I think they just shipped the ability to create vinyls for your own music that you upload to Spotify. Wait, like physical vinyls? Like physical vinyls. Yeah. Yeah. Like the gong for physical. Yeah. I want some. Great hit, Jordy. We need We've been looking to make vinyl. We want to crash the show onto vinyl.

Of course, we we've had people reach out and complain that they they want to listen to the show every day, but they only listen to audio. They've listened to the whole catalog, but they want to listen at the highest possible fidelity. Do you remember Do you remember there was that Stripe thing?

They made that physical magazine back in the day. I don't know if you actually like with paper. Yeah, it was like a physical magazine. This was from Stripe, the payments company. Wow. I know. I somehow missed this. I I know press the book. They are print maxis. Um I I got to get a copy of that.

That that probably trades at a premium probably. Uh in in the m it should be in the business hall of fame, the business uh museum. Uh that Yeah, that Yeah, that's fantastic. Uh well, we don't want to keep you too much longer. Thank you so much for hopping on the stream. Congrats on the round. We'll see you at the B.

Say hello to all the folks in Altimeter. We'll talk to you soon. Cheers. Bye. Okay, bye. Uh, let me tell you about adquick. com. Out of home advertising made easy and measurable. Say goodbye to the headaches of out of home advertising.

Only adqu combines technology out of home expertise and data to enable efficient seamless ad buying across the globe. Uh, EMTT Shear has a post. The way that chat GBT and Claude etc. are all trying to be the portal for the entire internet reminds me a good deal of the first internet boom in Yahoo.

I think the ultimate winners will wind up specialized just like last time. Shopping, entertainment, search. So he's thinking Amazon, Netflix, Google, and we'll have similar breakouts. It's interesting. I don't know that I completely like and this comment kind of puts him in the truth zone.

To be fair, Google Dwayne says control alt Dwayne says to be fair, Google did become the portal for the entire internet. Yahoo tried, but Google executed better. Chat GPT has already won for the moment, but whether they're the next Google or Yahoo AI remains to be seen. They're doing a lot of things right.

Yeah, I I I wonder how much consumer AI or like EMTT fires back to just to to close it out. Google's not a YouTube Yahoo style portal. They are still way behind on shopping versus specialists, for example. layer search first and foremost and then also have extended into portfolio of adjacencies.

It's not one interface to everything though. Yeah, I don't know. I I I do I do wonder how the consumer AI apps will fragment.

Um we're obviously going to talk to the metapholics about personalized super intelligence and um we saw this chart that went up just recently about how people actually use chatpt and there are some pretty clear buckets like there are there are different people using different uh modes of chatpt uh from practical guidance tutoring teaching seeking information was 21% of searches uh writing was 28% uh multimedia creating an image.

Uh that was 6%. And so you could imagine some of those getting peeled off and kind of becoming their own their own uh their own apps that are highly specialized. I tend to believe in aggregation and um like Ben Thompson has this point about uh Google.

There was a moment when everyone was saying Google's cooked because of vertical search. So there's going to be Yelp for restaurants. It's the Google of restaurants. They will do it better than Google can.

Yeah, there will be travel sites, there will be mapping sites, there will be different sites for searching specific things that people will remember to go to. And Google really did change their entire model. They adapted, they improvised, they overcame and ultimately damaged by vertical search.

The question I mean uh you have to kind of ask yourself how bullish you are in agents, right? Because historically, you would search something in Google and then you'd go to a standalone. Maybe you'd go to a website or an application.

Yet, there's a lot of websites and applications that I only maybe use once in my life, once a year. Do I actually want it? Do I do I uh I' oftentimes I' I'd prefer to have an agent, for example, like book me a hotel, right? These are classic examples. And so, I think that I think the paradigm is is shifting.

Uh, but without further ado, we have Tor,