Adept
Adept (Adept AI Labs) set out to build AI agents and multimodal 'action' models that can operate software and automate digital workflows. It was founded in 2022 by a team including David Luan (ex-OpenAI VP of Engineering) and several researchers who had worked on the Transformer architecture. In June 2024 Amazon hired co-founder and CEO David Luan along with co-founders Augustus Odena, Maxwell Nye, Erich Elsen, and Kelsey Szot and took a non-exclusive license to Adept's agent technology, models, and datasets; the remaining company refocused on agentic-AI solutions with engineering head Zach Brock taking over as CEO.
Adept raised about $350M in 2023 at a roughly $1B valuation, then in June 2024 lost its CEO and several co-founders to Amazon in a hire-and-license deal, a high-profile example of big tech absorbing the talent and IP of a leading agent startup while leaving a diminished independent company behind.
adept.ai ↗·Autonomous Agent Platforms·
United States·private