Seattle-based Kanu AI has raised $11.7 million in new funding to expand its platform that turns everyday employee workflows into custom enterprise software.
The round was led by Trilogy Equity Partners, with participation from a16z speedrun, BMW i Ventures and Accel.
Kanu AI plans to use the funding to expand its engineering, compiler research and business development teams while accelerating the deployment of its workflow-generation platform across North America.
Founded just over a year ago, Kanu AI focuses on a common challenge for businesses: valuable operational knowledge is often spread across spreadsheets, emails, software systems and individual employees.
Instead of requiring companies to purchase rigid software or spend months building custom applications, Kanu allows employees to demonstrate how they complete their work.
Its platform captures those processes and automatically turns them into production-grade software workflows that can run inside a customer’s cloud environment.
Kanu’s platform is designed to operate within a customer’s existing cloud infrastructure.
The company says this approach allows enterprise data to remain behind existing security controls and firewalls.
The platform also includes human approval steps and audit trails for automated outputs, helping organizations maintain oversight of workflows generated by the system.
Kanu’s software is currently available through the AWS Marketplace and Google Cloud Marketplace.
Kanu says its revenue has more than doubled in every quarter since launch.
The platform is currently being used by companies across industries including commercial real estate, insurance, financial services and technology.
“Companies have spent decades buying software built around someone else’s idea of how they should work,” said Karan Grover, founder and CEO of Kanu AI. “Instead of renting generic intelligence from another vendor, companies can use Kanu to turn their own data, judgment, and operating expertise into an asset they own.”
In one deployment for a national customer, Kanu said it reduced a complex data-analysis process involving PDFs, emails, CRM systems and GIS data from approximately eight weeks to less than 10 minutes.
The company expects the deployment to reduce annual software costs by more than $1 million while supporting millions of dollars in additional revenue.
Kanu AI will use the new capital to hire across engineering and business functions.
The company also plans to continue developing its core systems engineering and compiler technology while expanding the use of its workflow-generation platform among enterprise customers.
Kanu AI was founded and is led by CEO Karan Grover, a machine learning engineer, three-time founder and Y Combinator alumnus who previously worked as an engineer at Amazon and DoorDash.
Before Kanu, Grover also founded a startup focused on 3D audio technology designed to help blind people navigate physical environments through sound.
With its latest funding, Kanu AI is focused on expanding its enterprise automation platform and helping businesses convert internal operational knowledge into software that can be deployed and maintained within their own cloud environments.
