With the availability of different types of generative AI models increasing, more businesses are including features such as summarization, prompt-based image generation and even music-making in their solutions. Leap AI is building a solution for these companies to easily integrate AI-powered workflows or even build their own using an easy process.
The company is aiming to cater to use cases ranging from consumer-facing apps such as Songburst to internal tools for businesses. Leap AI offers ready templates such as music/beat generators and professional headshot generators. Alternatively, companies can build their own workflows using building blocks offered by the startup.
The startup offers a free plan with limited credits for AI model queries and a limited number of workflows to try out their solution. It also has plans starting from $29 per month with more credits, no limit on building workflows and customer support.
Why did the founders build Leap AI?
Leap AI was started in February 2023 by Alex Schachne and Claudio Fuentes. Schachne founded two companies in the edtech space while he was at Johns Hopkins University. Fuentes, who has also founded a few startups previously, worked in companies like WeWork and Pypestream. Both co-founders met at the Founders Inc. Studio incubator program and started building Leap AI.
“We were invited to the studio as builders while we didn’t have any idea. They asked us to get together and try and build something. We started building AI-powered consumer tools such as generating children’s stories for parents,” the co-founders told TechCrunch over a call.
“While we were building these tools, we realized it was painful to manage all the orchestration between multiple models to create these workflows. So we wanted to automate this process and create an engine that keeps running in the background that effectively helps you augment your work.”
Funding and the future
The company has raised a $1.4 million seed round led by Founders Inc. with participation from Carya Venture Partners, Gaingels, performance monitoring startup Sentry’s founder David Cramer and Firebase alternative Supabase’s founder Paul Copplestone, along with executives from Google and AngelList.
Leap AI already has a few customers, including Heineken, Inflection and Live Nation. The co-founders said that Live Nation uses their solution to build an internal tool, which generates brand-consistent assets.
The company said that it is trying to iterate fast on products by using its workflows in its solution for things like customer support and content generation.
Fuentes said that the company’s ability to run AI-powered tasks gives it an edge over agent-based solutions.
“One thing that we’re fundamentally doing differently is the ability to schedule these things to run automatically in the background and have your workforce operating without you needing to come to the chatbox and ask it every single time you need something. Another unique aspect is that we provide the interoperability between multiple models, multiple vendors and multiple companies,” he said.
Schachne thinks that getting partnerships like integrations with Zapier, Vercel and Superbase will help the company stand out from others.
The company said it is investing resources into revamping its workflow builder to replace a fixed-step approach with a chain of thought reasoning to achieve a goal. Leap AI is also working on improving context awareness of its workflows so it can leverage previously generated results.
Furqan Rydhan, the founder of Founders Inc. said that Leap AI could become the default solution for anyone trying to integrate AI into their workflow.
“We see Leap as an opportunity to build the “picks and shovels” for the next wave of use cases that will emerge during this platform shift. Our main challenges will be the speed of execution,” he told TechCrunch over email.
