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A founder who was among the first in the race to build self-driving vehicles has raised $15 million for his next business: a startup that claims its artificial intelligence can write enterprise software on its own.
Cosmically — as the UK-based startup is called — is led by Ben Peters, technical co-founder of FiveAI (the self-driving startup acquired by Bosch in 2022). Notion Capital is leading the Series A, with Hoxton Ventures and Chalfen Ventures also participating. This comes on the heels of Cogna, which was founded in May 2023, raising a $4.75 million seed round earlier this year from a number of investors, including Peters’ FiveAI co-founder Stan Poland and Herman Hauser, founder of Acorn Software.
Cogna focuses on the world of ERP. Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) is a dry but absolutely essential software component of enterprise management, covering everything from purchasing, supply chain and inventory management to risk assessments, finance and human resources. Typically, large organizations can pay up to billions of dollars in contracts with systems integrators and consulting firms to handle enterprise resource planning (ERP), either by customizing off-the-shelf software for customers, or writing custom applications from the ground up, to suit the organization’s specific needs.
In typical AI startup fashion, Peters believes this work is best done and can be compressed into a purpose-built AI platform. While some challenges have been more difficult for AI to address than others, there have been some early signs that ERP is likely to be one area where it can survive, and for Cogna to become one of the players delivering performance. Good on this field. A year after its launch, Cogna has signed up clients including UK gas distributor Cadent Gas and infrastructure and utility services provider Network Plus.
“To be clear, none of our customers think of it as ERP software,” Peters said in an interview. “For them, they have a problem that can’t be solved with SAP or (another) legacy system. We provide custom, precisely engineered software for that. They experience it as a classic piece of SaaS, but it’s built specifically for them, specifically for their workflow. It’s written by a proprietary AI With us.
Cogna balances a mix of generative AI with other types of tools to put its custom software together. The company claims that non-technical teams can describe their vulnerabilities in natural language, while Cogna does the rest.
“We are a team of experts in domain-specific languages, translators, AI, and reliable, scalable enterprise SaaS,” Peters said.
These days, it is not uncommon to come across AI startups leveraging multiple large language models simultaneously depending on the particular task at hand – customization is what makes a startup unique – and that is the case here as well. Peters said the language models used for people to interact with its platform come from a variety of providers including OpenAI and Anthropic. This is “an essential part of our natural language translator,” Peters told TechCrunch over a phone call.
What’s more, Cogna is building an engine so that “the software can actually write itself,” said Hossein Kanji, co-founder of Hoxton Ventures.
In doing so, Cogna is an example of how generative AI — which has seen a viral explosion with the launch of consumer-accessible services like ChatGPT — can be integrated into enterprise use and more complex applications. This is important because a number of established AI companies, such as OpenAI, have made clear that they also have ambitions to tap into the enterprise market, a highly lucrative area that will help them generate the massive revenues that investors expect.
Kanji is similar to what Cogna is doing with Cursor, Anysphere’s code building tool powered by OpenAI. We broke the news last week that Anysphere is in the middle of a massive and unwanted bidding war between investors who want to back it, with Anysphere valued at up to $2.5 billion on the back of massive business growth, so the area is clearly very hot.
“That’s kind of what Cogna does too,” he said.
Drawing on his experience at self-driving technology company FiveAI, Peters is skilled at spotting market opportunities early, but he also has experience in how to change course, so to speak, when plans don’t go as you expect. .
“We had cars driving around London in 2018,” he recalls. “(But) we then focused on providing the development environment to develop a package for other companies that were building their own electronic design automation suites. We were running a million simulations a day by the time we sold the company.”
Five.ai, which raised about $78 million in funding, was valued at $216 million in its latest round before being acquired by Bosch for an undisclosed sum.
Cogna now plans to take on classic IT consulting firms such as Wipro and CapGemini.
The investment in Cogna is the first by Bryan Gartner, formerly of Khosla Ventures, who joined Hoxton as its newest partner last year.
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