Analysis of Amazon’s Adept AI Deal

According to a recent research, the global agentic AI market is expected to grow at 41% CAGR from $7.3 billion in 2025 to $41.3 billion by 2030. San Francisco-based Adept AI is trying to make its mark in this high growth, yet competitive space.

Adept AI’s offerings

Adept was founded in 2022 by a team of seasoned machine learning researchers, including former OpenAI VP David Luan and Google Brain scientists Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar. The team set up Adept with the goal of building an AI model that could perform actions on any software tool using natural language. Essentially, the group wanted to create an “AI teammate” trained to use a variety of software tools and APIs. Co-founder Luan imagined a possibility where an engineer would provide its AI assistant with a task, watch it complete that task using the right software programs and the necessary commands with its human as a co-pilot. The human could also request modifications on the response, and the AI assistant would address those requests as well.

Adept’s flagship model, ACT-1, was designed with this objective. It can interpret natural language inputs and perform corresponding actions within software tools, effectively acting as a digital assistant for users. For instance, ACT-1 can automate tasks such as extracting information from documents, updating internal systems, and sending emails, thus improving productivity and reducing manual effort. ACT-2 is another AI agent that leverages a proprietary large language model Fuyu to understand and manipulate visual information to complete tasks such as filling out forms, processing invoices, and planning schedules.

Adept’s plans to continue to build advanced AI models and agents capable of carrying more complicated autonomous tasks were put on hold due to the significant costs of training AI models. Instead of working to make general intelligence breakthroughs, Adept instead is focusing on solutions that enable agentic AI and is working with partners to bring agentic capabilities to their products and tools.

Adept AI’s Financials

Adept AI remains privately held and does not disclose its financials. In March 2023, it raised $350 million in a Series B funding round from investors including General Catalyst, Spark Capital, Addition, Greylock, Atlassian Ventures, Microsoft, Nvidia, Workday Ventures, Caterina Fake, Frontiers Capital, PSP Growth, SV Angel and A.Capital, bringing its total funding to $415 million. The round had valued Adept at over $1 billion.

In 2024, Adept went through a reorganization when Adept’s co-founders were hired away by Amazon. As part of the agreement, Adept co-founder and CEO David Luan joined Amazon, along with other co-founders Augustus Odena, Maxwell Nye, Erich Elsen, Kelsey Szot, and a few other Adept employees. Reports suggest that Adept was looking for a potential acquisition by Microsoft or Meta during this time. Instead, it chose to part with some of its employees and founders in a deal that gave Amazon access to engineering and leadership talent and gave Adept the opportunity to continue to do business independently.

As part of the deal, Amazon will license Adept’s technology, multimodal models, and some datasets to accelerate its AI growth. Valuations and financials post the reorganization are not available. Many believe that Amazon’s deal with Adept is its way of avoiding antitrust scrutiny. Earlier last year, Microsoft had entered into a similar agreement with Inflection when it hired most of its employees and entered into a licensing agreement with Inflection to pay out the investors.

Post the deal, Adept’s head of engineering, Zach Brock became the CEO. Zach has over 15 years of experience building software products and has been a successful entrepreneur before. Tim Weingarten remained as its Head of Product.

Adept is not the only player trying to make its presence felt in the industry that is already dominated by major giants including Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, all working to provide services to end users. So what is the eventual exit for Adept’s investors if Amazon cannot fully acquire them?

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