CrewAI Inc., the developer of a popular tool for building artificial intelligence agents, has raised $18 million in funding to support its growth efforts.

The startup announced the milestone today. It raised the capital over two rounds: a seed investment led by boldstart ventures and a Series A raise led by Insight Partners. CrewAI’s backers also include prominent AI researcher Andrew Ng and HubSpot Inc. co-founder Dharmesh Shah.

Many enterprise machine learning projects revolve around so-called AI agents. Those are large language models customized to perform a narrow set of tasks. An e-commerce company, for example, could create an agent that uses GPT-4o to generate shopping advice based on customers’ past purchases.

CrewAI has created an open-source framework of the same name that makes it easier for developers to build AI agents. It also promises to simplify several related chores. Most notably, CrewAI’s framework enables AI agents to collaborate with one another on complex tasks.

Using the software, a brick-and-mortar retailer could create an agent that searches the web for information on rival stores. The company’s developers could then create a second agent that summarizes the collected information and visualizes the most important data points in graphs. Under the hood, CrewAI automates auxiliary tasks such as facilitating the movement of data between agents.

The framework integrates with another open-source tool called LangChain. Using the latter software, developers can enable their AI agents to interact with third-party systems such as databases and search engines. LangChain provides prepackaged integrations with dozens of applications that remove the need for software teams to build custom connectors.

After they create a collection of AI agents, developers can use a testing tool built into CrewAI to ensure that the software works as intended. The tool assigns the agents a set of sample tasks and measures the accuracy with which they are completed.

“Agents are the key to unlocking AI’s potential and will completely redesign the way companies deliver products,” said CrewAI founder and Chief Executive Officer João Moura. “RPA and LLMs alone can’t get you there.”

CrewAI generates revenue by selling a paid version of its framework, CrewAI Enterprise, that moved into general availability in conjunction with today’s funding announcement. The offering provides a no-code interface for building AI agents. It also includes templates for common use cases that spare developers the hassle of building everything from scratch.

For administrators, in turn, CrewAI Enterprise offers features that ease the task of running agents in production. The software monitors AI models’ performance and generates an alert when it detects issues. There are also cybersecurity controls that enable administrators to regulate who can access which agent.

CrewAI Enterprise’s launch into general availability today follows a beta program that ran for several months. According to the company, more than 150 enterprise customers signed up for the software in that time frame.

Image: CrewAI