Weave raises $13.5M to build AI prompt router that cuts enterprise coding token costs by up to 80%

Speaker 2: Raise capital at the New York Stock Exchange. Just do it. That your soundboard is fantastic today. We have Adam Cohen from Weave, the cofounder and CEO, coming on the show with an amazing fundraising news. Adam, how are doing?

Speaker 8: Good. We're in good spirits. We're Yeah.

Speaker 2: We we signed with Standard, so we're What's behind you? What's behind you? You gotta go. Woah. What do you got there? Woah. The Gongs are going viral. Why don't you guys hit it in unison? Gong. Yes. Tell us. How much did you raise?

Speaker 8: We raised 13,500,000 thanks to Standard.

Speaker 2: Congratulations.

Speaker 1: Now Alright. Quick history on the company. Please. And yeah. Then we'll get we can get more into the round and where you're going.

Speaker 8: Yeah. So we we started this company just under two years ago. We went through YC at the start of last year. The idea originally would just measure software engineering. Yeah. Very quickly, this turned into measuring AI because that was the you know, kinda took over. Mhmm. And what we realized ahead of the curve, we've always kind of been working with the, like, token maxers of the world is figuring out once Opus four seven four a came out, people realized they didn't need the best models for every task. And specifically for coding, this is, like, 80% of AI spend. So we built the world's best prompt router. It reads your prompt and actually shifts it to the right model at the cheapest cost. Mhmm. And this is what Standard's, like, super excited about, and we are starting to, yeah, go crazy with.

Speaker 2: What who who do you sell to? Do you sell to the CEO, the CFO, the CTO?

Speaker 8: Yeah. We sell to the CTO. Okay. CFOs, CEOs obviously love us, but, like, we're only focused on engineering. We think that's, like, still the majority of where AI spend is happening. So we're just focused on, like, every engineering test as opposed to, like yeah. A lot of the other routers are trying to do some other things or either app level routing or just code routing.

Speaker 1: Okay. And then, yeah, how how do you differentiate the Yeah. The router. Break break that down. App app level routing, that's somebody that's integrating a router into their product so that behind the scenes, it's just deciding it for the user. This is more of purely this sort of enterprise focus where teams are doing various tasks or they have agents running and you're sitting in between them and the models to run all of those processes as efficiently as possible.

Speaker 8: Yeah. That's exact like the app level routing. For us, what we're doing is, like, anybody using Cloud Code or Codecs plugs in our router. It sits directly in their current workflow, adds, like, next to no latency, and it will route to whatever the most cost efficient model is. So we host all the open source models in The US. They prompt, it routes to the right spot, and they save up to well, some companies up to 80%.

Speaker 2: That's amazing. How what is customer acquisition like? Is this, you know, like, person to person at the highest level? You're going after enterprise CTOs, so you're meeting them, talking to them, or is there, like, a self serve option for like small businesses? Because it feels like a lot of small businesses, they might be starting to use AI, starting to use coding, but a lot of them are on a $200 plan. They're getting great value. They don't really they're not really in the like token maxing is going to, you know, make or break my business this quarter.

Speaker 8: Exactly. Yeah. So, like, all the max plans, people still don't care that much. We have some startups spending, like, $5.10 k per engineer per month. We're in that bucket, but, like, startups still don't care Yeah. That much. So it's mostly, like, enterprises that we're targeting. Yeah. We work with, like, developer experience or developer productivity teams. They're kind of owning this now, the, like, optimization layer. Sure. Sure. Is it fair to say that something like fifteen minutes could save you up to

Speaker 1: 20% on your token bill?

Speaker 2: Absolutely. What what what's that tag about? Is that GEICO or something? Yeah. GEICO. Sorry. Bad joke. Bad joke.

Speaker 1: Couldn't help myself.

Speaker 2: Well, so so what is your what what does your actual team look like? Are you building in San Francisco post y c?

Speaker 8: Ours. It's the only way for for what we're doing. Yeah. We're all in person. 6, you know, 996 kind of feel here. Seems really fired up. They all want to join the video, but we we weren't sure how how far to push this. Yeah. They could come say they could just come say hi if they're if they're hanging out. Why not? But what what what what 9 is not even enough.

Speaker 1: You you don't you're not even that differentiated if you're doing nine nine six these days, I feel like. There's an opportunity. There's there's

Speaker 8: you've got companies that are, you know, putting in seven, sometimes eight. Eight days a week. Yeah. There you go. There you go. That's why you have to jump out of a plane to attract talent. This is the best part of the video is we've had, like, an influx of people that are interested, I think, just because I did my fears of acting was scarier than the

Speaker 2: jumping out of a plane. Yeah. I talked to I heard one entrepreneur who said he changed manipulated time. He has he every day is three days. Because Oh, yeah. His first day goes from 6AM to noon. His second day goes from noon to 6PM. Then he works the third day from 6PM. Stack that up over a over a day Yeah. He's gonna crush or a month. Yeah. Yeah. And he's not crazy for saying that you're crazy.

Speaker 1: Anyway Sorry. We're having we're having too much fun. It feels feel feeling like a Friday over here. What are you where are you where are you going from here? Are you gonna keep the team small

Speaker 8: or you Yeah. There's about 16 of us. We are hiring very aggressively. Mhmm. Yeah. We need some, like, incredible, engineers and AEs to just scale up. We are swamped. I feel bad. Our kind of, like, campaign to our account executive and to our go to market team is a debt to to Jerry. Jerry's our AE, and he is, too busy with too many meetings. So, we wanna make him as tired as possible, and now we need a second. Yeah. Is there going to be like, long tail demand for fine tuning of

Speaker 2: of open source models from your customer base? Like, if they're doing something really routine, typically, that's been the domain of, like, the NeoLabs, and I don't know if that's the right term for your company, but it feels like you could slide there over time. Is that an ambition?

Speaker 8: Absolutely. So, actually, we already have, like, a a early version of this where you can give feedback in the router Sure. To the router based on what model you're choosing Yeah. Or what model it chooses. You just easily pass feedback, and it's gonna learn from this. Yeah. So we do this both as, like, a company. We have RRL built in, but now we're exploring what this looks like at a per org basis. Yeah. So if the if the company is just printing money, can be like, when I ask for the weather, I do want you to use the Frontier Intelligence for that. No. That's probably the default thing is like, you know, people are just hammering off prompts for everything, routing around the obvious solutions is the benefit. Makes a ton of sense. Well, congratulations.

Speaker 2: Don't break that gong all too soon. You gotta warm them up. We've learned this the hard way. Every time we we hit our gong, somebody comments and says You didn't warm it up. Didn't warm it up. You didn't warm it up. But so far May the gong so good for us. Ring loud and often for your business. Good luck, and thank you so much for coming on the show to break it down. Great to meet you. Have a great rest of your day. Let me tell you about Shopify. Shopify is the commerce platform that grows with your business, lets you sell in seconds online, in store, on mobile, on social, on marketplaces, and now with AI agents. Big news out of the Fed. The Fed holds rate steady, but three officials voted for a rate increase. The rate has been unchanged in in this July meeting. The split shows pressure building inside the central bank to act on inflation two months after chairman Kevin Walsh took over, and the Dow skids 1,100 points as investors worry about Fed next steps. They're thinking that there might be a rate hike in the in reaction to inflation, of course, somewhat driven by energy prices, oil prices. Oil is spiking again. And so lots of tricky news for the global economy, but, fortunately, the economy chugs on and the economy is strong. So I believe in it. I believe in it too. Never never black pill. Have faith. Dwarkesh Patel's certainly not black pilling. Gavin Baker quote tweeted Dwarkesh's post that predicted lab revenues and the trillions very shortly. Gavin Baker says, I see a series of fairly wild thoughts from Dwarkash. I thought I was bullish, but even I am not assuming that the price to rent compute continues to go up. I will say that I am in Silicon Valley this week and Duarkesh is capturing the zeitgeist. Net net, public markets would probably be trading differently if they saw the OpenAI, Anthropic, Grok cursor and open source numbers over the last six weeks because everything is growing. Even there's so much horse race around, Oh, open source is going to come and grow. And it's like, Well, sometimes open source comes and grows, and everything else grows, too. And that's what we've seen throughout the whole deep sea saga when the lab revenues grew a ton even though open source was big. Yeah. There's a comment here that I think is on the nose. Please. Jay Capital says, timeline is very interesting. All private AI companies have their best six weeks while retail AI slash semis have their worst six weeks. Very, very interesting. So disconnect there. Yeah. I mean, one of them, SK Hynix, $64,000,000,000 in quarterly profit. It was a disappointment for chip investors, and SK Hynix fell 10% despite record results powered by the AI boom. The profit increase was incredible. I think they grew profit over 500%, something like that, and still the stock traded down because expectations are so high, everything's priced to perfection. In other news, HBO Max is launching HBO Max Shorts for those who don't have the attention span to watch an episode of TV. It's a mobile feature designed for users to watch iconic and memorial scenes from the HBO library in a vertical and scrollable feed. This is already happening on Instagram and TikTok. You see a lot of movie clips, just great moments, and it actually is great content, so I can understand why they're trying to own a piece of that. We've gotta get the Jeffrey Katzenberg apology form stipulated. For sure. Yeah. For sure. But, yeah, High Yield Harry captures it pretty well watching society become too cooked even to watch TV episode. And this is from Idiocracy, Mike Judge's one of his best works, the creator of HBO's Silicon Valley, actually, who will now be available in short form because you will be able to watch short clips from HBO Silicon Valley. On HBO Max shorts, you'll be able to see the the I don't know. All all all the iconic moments from Silicon Valley when they're hanging out on the roof of Google or whatever the Google equivalent is, Gavin Belson's company. Anyway, thank you so much for tuning in to TBPN. We will see you tomorrow at 11AM Pacific. Leave us five stars on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, and sign up for our newsletter at tbpn.com. We'll see you tomorrow. You. Goodbye. That's the outro. Goodbye.