San Francisco-based AI startup Yutori has raised $15 million in funding to develop advanced AI personal assistants, the company announced on Thursday. The funding round was led by Radical Ventures’ Rob Toews, with participation from Felicis, AI pioneer Fei-Fei Li, and Google DeepMind’s chief scientist Jeff Dean.

Founded by former Meta AI executives Devi Parikh and Dhruv Batra, Yutori is among a growing wave of AI startups building autonomous agents—AI-powered systems capable of performing complex tasks independently. Experts, including OpenAI CFO Sarah Friar, have predicted that such AI-driven automation will be a key focus this year, as AI models have evolved to handle multi-step online tasks with minimal human intervention.

Parikh highlighted that while chatbots are widely used, they lack the ability to execute tasks on users’ behalf. Yutori aims to redefine user interactions with AI, focusing on automating processes from simple online orders to intricate travel planning.

The startup is emphasizing post-training techniques to refine AI models, enhancing their ability to navigate the web and improve performance beyond initial training. This approach aligns with advancements in AI reasoning seen in models like OpenAI’s latest o1 and o3 models.

Yutori’s founding team includes AI specialists who previously worked on Meta’s multimodal and embodied AI research, along with experts behind the post-training development of Llama 3 and Llama 4, Meta’s leading open-source AI models.