Artificial intelligence (AI) startup Cognosys has secured $2 million CAD in a seed round.

Sangeen Zeb at Google Ventures led the round, with participation from Guillermo Rauch (CEO at Vercel), Amjad Masad (CEO at Replit), Aidan Gomez (CEO at Cohere), Ivan Zhang (CTO at Cohere), and Untapped VC, and managing partner Yohei Nakajima (BabyAGI). The closing date of the round was not disclosed.

Cognosys said it will use the funds to accelerate its growth, expand its team, refine its platform, and enhance its product’s AI capabilities.

Cognosys users set out a goal for their AI agents, which could range from optimizing workflows to planning leisure activities

The company, which is headquartered in Vancouver, is creating web-based AI agents that it claims will serve as personal assistants.

The startup said that its product will soon support integration with several generative AI tools, including Google’s PaLM API, Cohere’s API, and Anthropic’s Claude models.

With Cognosys, users set out a goal for their AI agents, which could range from optimizing workflows to planning leisure activities. The goal can be customized with additional tasks. The output can be generated in various formats, from formatted code, tables, or text, and can be easily copied or downloaded for further use.

While OpenAI’s ChatGPT specializes in producing text and dialogue that imitates human interaction, Cognosys claims that its tool tailors a plan to meet users’ specific goals, and creates a series of agents each responsible for completing particular tasks. The startup said its AI tool not only offers solutions, but shows the computing processes leading to that objective.

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Cognosys is rolling out its tech at a time when the AI space is fraught with concerns over the speed and pace of its innovation. In late May, a Member of Parliament and a Canadian Senator concerned with the pace of technology versus that of regulation announced they are forming a parliamentary caucus on emerging technology. AI was one of the technologies they singled out for examination.

As well, recent open letters from the likes of Yoshua Bengio, the co-founder of Montréal-based Mila, along with hundreds of tech leaders, AI researchers, policymakers and other concerned parties, have urged all AI labs to agree to a six-month pause on training systems that are more powerful than GPT-4.

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Cognosys is also working with some of the headier AI startups in the space. Toronto-based startup Cohere is among the first four companies to receive funding from Salesforce Ventures’ newly-launched $250 million fund as part of a broader play into generative AI.

Co-founded by Aidan Gomez (CEO), Ivan Zhang, and Nick Frosst in 2019, Cohere provides access to large-language models and natural language processing (NLP) tools through one API. Its platform can be used to generate or analyze text to do things like write text, moderate content, classify data, and extract information.

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