Convey, a startup founded last year that builds AI "teammates," has raised $38 million in Series A funding led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from Khosla Ventures and Pear VC.
AI agents have become one of the hottest corners of enterprise software, with startups and tech giants racing to build tools that can take actions on a worker's behalf. This week, Salesforce agreed to buy Fin, an AI-driven customer service agent platform, for $3.6 billion.
Convey is trying to shed the agent label.
"Agents feel a bit overloaded at this point in time," cofounder and CEO Rohan Chopra told Business Insider. "We emphasize teammate over agent because the teammate is responsible for an outcome, not just a specific task."
Chopra, one of the first engineers at DoorDash, said he got the inspiration for Convey more than a decade ago when he saw a co-worker, "Steve," a "very smart dude," wasting his time manually tracking every driver on his iPhone to assign deliveries.
"Orders would come in from various restaurants," he said. "Steve would look at his phone, send a text to the dasher, be like, 'Hey, can you go grab this order of hummus?"
Chopra helped DoorDash automate that workflow, freeing Steve to work on more important things. Years later, with the rise of AI, he thought businesses without DoorDash's engineering budget should be able to liberate their "Steves" too.
Joe Schmidt, a partner at Andreessen Horowitz who is joining Convey's board, said the firm's investment had two main drivers: the founding team and the size of the opportunity to automate manual work.
"I think this is going to be a way that every company across the economy can grow faster," he said. "The humans inside those companies can be doing the work they actually want to do."
So far, Convey has signed NBCUniversal, Samsara, TelevisaUnivision, Unity, Faire, and ChargePoint as customers.
One threat to Convey is that OpenAI, Anthropic, and other large AI labs could push deeper into agents. Chopra dismissed that concern by comparing it to DoorDash's early days, when skeptics asked what would happen if Uber decided to compete directly. His answer is that broad platforms do not always win every market.
"The biggest advantage of Convey is focus," he said.
Convey is raising money at a moment when many workers are worried about being replaced by AI. Companies like Snap, Block, and Wix all cited AI as a factor in recent layoffs.
Chopra acknowledged that fear, but said he has found employees closest to the work are often the most excited because they are handing off repetitive tasks they did not want to do in the first place.
He cited an employee at a large restaurant chain he came across who spent hours at the end of every day doing manual data entry.
"That is not how she wanted to spend her evenings," he said.
The best use cases, Chopra said, are tasks that are "rote and operational," with an objective right answer. Workers can breathe a sigh of relief that they are still better at anything involving strategy and customer relationships.
"That's the piece that remains human well into the future," he said.
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I'm a senior correspondent at Business Insider, where I investigate the tech industry with a focus on venture capital and startups.I can frequently be seen on CNN, NBC News, CBS News, and other channels providing analysis on a range of business and economic topics. I also appear at dozens of the biggest events around the world, including the World Economic Forum, HumanX, and Web Summit.Please get in touch if you have a story to tell securely on Signal. Here are some examples of stories I've written:
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