🗂️ The Unicorn CTO #130 - The AI Agent Stack

Daniel Jarjoura -

Hello friend,

Letta, an open-source startup to create, deploy and manage AI agents at scale, recently shared its vision for the evolving AI agent stack. Unlike traditional LLMs, AI agents are built to answer questions, make decisions, and execute actions based on context and task requirements. And to build agents, developers need tools that allow these agents to retain memory, use external tools, and communicate with each other. This stack of tools is essential for transforming a standard LLM into a full-fledged agent with long-term memory and advanced reasoning.

Here’s Letta’s take on the 5 layers of the AI agents stack:

1️⃣ Model Serving – The foundational layer where LLMs are deployed via inference engines like OpenAI, Mistral AI, or vLLM.

2️⃣ Storage – Essential for maintaining state, with tools like vector databases (e.g., Qdrant) or Postgres-based solutions (e.g., Supabase).

3️⃣ Tools & Libraries – Enables agents to call external tools like LangChain or CrewAI, using structured JSON outputs for secure execution.

4️⃣ Agent Frameworks – Manages agent state and orchestration. Frameworks like Letta and LangGraph even support cross-agent communication for collaborative workflows.

5️⃣ Agent Hosting & Serving – The future of agents lies in scalable, REST API-driven services for on-prem or cloud environments, ensuring persistent state and secure execution at scale.

Letta envisions a future where these layers come together to create production-ready AI agents, simplifying deployment and making autonomous systems accessible to developers globally.

What are your thoughts?

P.S.: if you're a CTO or tech leader, you can join the free Unicorn CTO Slack community. We're a small group of international CTOs and tech leaders, and we often meet for virtual (or not) coffees.

Now, let's dive into last week's developer-first transactions.

💰 Market Summary - Week of November 11th, 2024

  • 14 companies raised $521.3 million across 8 product categories in 6 countries.
  • Europe-based companies attracted 37% of the total funding vs 4% for Asia-based companies and 59% for US-based companies (including Canada 🇨🇦).
  • DevTool is the category that attracted the highest funding.
  • 0 companies provide or contribute to an open-source product.
  • 3 companies were acquired this week.

🧩 Funding by Product Category

🌎 Funding by Region

🏢 Funding By Company

Writer, based in San Francisco 🇺🇸, raised $200M in Series C funding co-led by Premji Invest, Radical Ventures and ICONIQ Growth. Writer is a full-stack generative AI platform that offers enterprise-grade solutions to accelerate growth, productivity, and compliance. (more)

Tessl, located in London 🇬🇧, disclosed a $25M Seed led by boldstart and GV and a $100M Series A led Index Ventures. Tessl is pioneering AI Native Development to reshape software development for the AI era. (more)

ScaleOps, from New York 🇺🇸 (and originally from Israel 🇮🇱), garnered $58M in Series B funding led by Lightspeed Venture Partners. ScaleOps offers a Kubernetes Optimisation Platform that automates Compute Resources adjustments in real-time. (more)

Conduktor, based in New York 🇺🇸 (and originally from France 🇫🇷), raised $30M in Series B funding from RTP Global. Conduktor simplifies and scales data streaming with its Enterprise Data Management platform using Apache Kafka. (more)

LocalStack, from Zurich 🇨🇭, secured $25M in Series A funding from Notable Capital and existing investors. LocalStack is a leading platform for local cloud development and testing, emulating cloud services for AWS. (more)

Northflank, located in London 🇬🇧, raised $22M in Series A funding from Bain Capital Ventures and Vertex Ventures. Northflank automates deployment of workloads on any cloud at any scale. (more)

UnifyApps, from Gurugram 🇮🇳, secured $20M in Series A funding led by ICONIQ Growth. UnifyApps offers a unified integration platform that accelerates enterprise application development and data sync. (more)

Cogna, based in London 🇬🇧, raised $15M in Series A funding from Notion Capital. Cogna uses AI to automate the IT consultancy process, delivering custom software solutions quickly and cost-effectively. (more)

Prelude, from Paris 🇫🇷, garnered $8M in Seed funding led by Singular Ventures and Seedcamp. Prelude revolutionises SMS verification and mobile onboarding with its unified APIs. (more)

Fastino, based in Palo Alto 🇺🇸, raised $7M in Seed funding from Insight Partners. Fastino optimises enterprise AI applications with high-performance language models designed for speed and security. (more)

Lume, from San Francisco 🇺🇸, secured $4.2M in Seed funding led by General Catalyst. Lume AI offers tools for data mapping between schemas, automating data ingestion and pipeline construction. (more)

HappyPath, located in New York 🇺🇸, raised $4M in Seed funding. HappyPath is enhancing software development with tools for natural language-based automated testing and reporting. (more)

runQL, from Waterloo 🇨🇦, secured $1.6M in Pre-Seed funding from Mistral Venture Partners. runQL is redefining data work with a modern SQL IDE that streamlines query management. (more)

TestSprite, located in Seattle 🇺🇸, raised $1.5M in Pre-Seed funding. TestSprite revolutionises software testing by enabling faster release cycles and improved software quality with its adaptive testing platform. (more)

🤝 Mergers & Acquisitions

Supermaven, based in New York 🇺🇸, was acquired by Anysphere. Founded to create intuitive development tools, Supermaven’s team is committed to designing solutions that are easy to learn, deliver consistent results, and are broadly accessible, enhancing developers’ workflows. Anysphere aims to integrate Supermaven’s tools to enhance its AI code editor, Cursor. (more)

Rapid, headquartered in San Francisco 🇺🇸, was acquired by Nokia. RapidAPI, the world’s largest API Hub, connects millions of developers to a vast range of public APIs. This acquisition by Nokia aims to bolster its capabilities in API integration and management, supporting its expansion into developer services on a global scale. (more)

Probely, located in Porto 🇵🇹, was acquired by Snyk. Probely specializes in web application and API security, aiming to bridge the gap between development, security, and operations by integrating security into the web application development lifecycle. Snyk’s acquisition of Probely enhances its security offerings, particularly in automated security testing. (more)

dockur / windows (✩ 9,919 stars this week) - Windows inside a Docker container.

exo-explore / exo (✩ 3,662 stars this week) - Run your own AI cluster at home with everyday devices 📱💻 🖥️⌚

vercel / ai-chatbot (✩ 2,571 stars this week) - A full-featured, hackable Next.js AI chatbot built by Vercel.

☕️ Developer-First Breakfast in Paris

Last week, I gathered some of the brightest minds in developer-first innovation at Avolta’s Paris office for an exclusive breakfast event. With Paris becoming a global hotspot for developer-first startups, the timing cannot be better to explore what it takes to succeed in this fast-growing space.

It was inspiring to listen to the insightful fireside chats:

🔥 Jean-Patrice Anciaux, General Partner at ISAI, shared what he's looking for in early-stage developer-first startups, highlighting his experience investing in Kestra, NuxtLabs, Strapi, and more.

🔥 Frank BITOUN (ex-Crayon, SoftwareOne, Dell Technologies) delivered a powerful playbook for succeeding in the U.S. market, focusing on enterprise sales strategies.

Thanks for reading this far! I'm excited to make this newsletter as helpful as possible and I would appreciate if you could share feedback or anything you want to find here.

Farewell,

Daniel