Point72 Ventures led a $12 million seed round for Pokee AI, a new Seattle-area startup aiming to build AI agents that automate online workflows. Qualcomm and Samsung also invested.
Founded last year by a former Meta manager and Stanford Ph.D., Pokee AI is developing a general-purpose AI agent designed to plan, reason, and take actions across thousands of internet tools and platforms — everything from generating marketing videos to formatting slides and posting on social media.
Pokee is one of many new startups building so-called AI agents, or autonomous systems that execute tasks beyond static outputs like text or code. These companies are attracting plenty of attention from early stage investors.
Pokee differentiates itself by applying reinforcement learning to help agents sequence and use tools efficiently, rather than relying solely on large language models. Reinforcement learning is a type of machine learning where an agent takes actions and learns through trial and error.
The company claims its technology delivers “over 97% accuracy when selecting from thousands of tools,” and avoids the limitations of function-calling via LLMs by offloading planning to a custom-built AI agent.
“The AI world has solved the generation problem, but no one has solved the execution problem,” said CEO Zheqing (Bill) Zhu. “We want to solve the execution problem.”
One early use case is social media marketing, where the agent can create content, enhance media, post across platforms, and monitor engagement.
Pokee is not generating revenue but has design partners and is working with Google on enterprise partnerships.
Its platform is now in public beta. Pokee supports integrations with Google Workspace, Meta, LinkedIn, YouTube, Jira, GitHub, Slack, Notion, and other popular web services. It eventually plans to release tools for enterprise users.
Zhu was previously head of applied reinforcement learning at Meta, where he worked for more than seven years. He completed his Ph.D. at Stanford in the same field and did his graduate and undergrad studies at Duke.
Pokee’s other co-founders include Michael Cai, head of product engineering; Christopher Wu, head of ML engineering; and Yi Wan, founding research scientist.
Other backers include Salience Capital, SCB 10X, Typeface founder Abhay Parasnis, and former Intel board member Lip-bu Tan.
The company has around 10 employees and is hiring for open roles in Bellevue and the Bay Area.
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