Convey closes on $38M round to help companies automate repetitive work with AI teammates

Agentic artificial intelligence startup Convey Inc. said today it has raised $38 million in early-stage funding to scale up its platform, which can be used by workers without technical skills to design, build and run digital teammates that can perform business tasks autonomously.

Andreessen Horowitz led the Series A round, which saw participation from Khosla Ventures and Pear VC. Convey said the funds will be used to enhance its product development efforts and expand the reach of its enterprise-grade platform.

Organizations are currently grappling with the tough realities of agentic AI implementations. Even though global investment in AI technology is projected to exceed $2.5 trillion this year, according to Gartner Inc., the vast majority of organizations are still struggling to realize any tangible benefits from these projects, especially when it comes to back-office task automation. According to Convey, even at the most innovative enterprises, their most skilled operatives can still spend several hours a day on manual tasks such as pulling data from spreadsheets, ingesting orders and creating recurring reports.

Existing AI assistants might be able to help some of these workers become a bit more productive, but they don’t really change the nature of enterprise work. Rather, they act as “copilots,” providing incremental gains in productivity rather than driving any dramatic gains. They can assist humans, but the vast majority of mundane business processes are still the responsibility of an employee – which is why most office workers are still bogged down with manual and repetitive tasks they were never really hired to do.

Convey’s goal is to eliminate this burden once and for all by empowering nontechnical office workers to design, onboard and then manage their own AI workforces. With its platform, anyone can create a digital teammate without needing to write a single line of code.

Once spun up, Convey’s autonomous agents can learn how to perform specific tasks, gather the needed context and then take full ownership of whatever responsibilities are handed to them. Critically, Convey said, it’s possible to onboard new AI teammates in about three hours. Once they’re deployed, they’ll be able to go ahead with automating tasks ranging from processing invoices and reconciling financial data to managing campaign reports and ingesting advertising assets at scale.

In an interview with Business Insider, the startup’s co-founder and Chief Executive Rohan Chopra said the company likes to emphasize the idea of AI teammates rather than agents because of the way they’re responsible for outcomes, as opposed to just being given a specific task to complete. Chopra previously worked as an engineer at DoorDash Inc., and was inspired by the struggles of a co-worker named Steve around a decade ago. He was a “very smart dude, wasting his time manually tracking every driver on his iPhone to assign deliveries,” he explained.

“Orders would come in from various restaurants,” Chopra 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 built the systems required to automate that workflow, enabling Steve to work on more important tasks. So when AI exploded into the public consciousness, he decided it was time to give every company access to the same kind of capabilities.

Convey’s AI teammates operate within strict security and governance boundaries. Each one is provisioned in partnership with enterprise information technology departments and connected to critical company systems, including legacy platforms that lack modern application programming interfaces, while the IT team configures its identity, access permissions and governance guardrails, Chopra explained.

So far, Convey’s platform has gone down well, driving measurable return on investment for early adopters. For instance, the business-to-business retail marketplace Faire Inc. has used Convey’s teammates to automate invoice processing tasks that previously consumed hundreds of manual hours. Meanwhile, an unnamed streaming service managed to free up more than 23,000 hours annually relating to its reporting and advertising workflows.

Andreessen Horowitz partner Joe Schmidt said one of the biggest problems in AI today is that many enterprises are struggling with “adoption without impact.” They keep increasing their usage of AI, but the ROI never materializes, he said. “Convey teammates own the outcome on an organization’s highest-impact operational work, making the return measurable from the start,” he explained.

Going forward, Convey’s mission now is to make every back-office operations team become AI-native. “We parachute in, help teams stand up their AI workforce, and hand the controls back so they own it,” Chopra explained. “This Series A will help us build that at scale.”

Photo: Convey