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Vercept develops an AI-powered desktop assistant designed to automate repetitive tasks for professionals. The company's technology focuses on enabling artificial intelligence to understand and directly interact with a user's local computer environment, rather than relying solely on cloud-based operations. This approach allows the AI to work alongside users, navigating and utilizing applications on a personal computer to enhance productivity.
The company was founded by Kiana Ehsani, Luca Weihs, and Ross Girshick, who started Vercept with the core insight that AI could function directly within the user's computer context. Their vision was to create intelligent agents that seamlessly integrate with desktop interactions, moving beyond distant cloud solutions to bring AI capabilities directly into the user's workflow. This foundational idea emerged from a desire to embed sophisticated AI directly into daily computing.
Vercept's product serves professionals aiming to improve efficiency by automating routine and time-consuming tasks. The company’s long-term vision is to establish AI that profoundly understands and operates within the unique context of each user's computer usage, empowering individuals through personalized, on-device artificial intelligence. The aim is to augment human capabilities by integrating intelligent assistance directly into everyday digital interactions.
Vercept has raised $16.0M across 1 funding round.
Vercept has raised $16.0M in total across 1 funding round.
Vercept has raised $16.0M across 1 funding round. Most recently, it raised $16.0M Seed in June 2025.
| Date | Round | Lead Investors | Other Investors | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jun 1, 2025 | $16M Seed | — | Acrew Capital, Alumni Ventures, Coelius Capital, Craft Ventures, Eniac Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, Tiffany Luck, Pear VC, Rock Yard Ventures, Saga, Y Combinator, Claire Hughes Johnson, Surahbi Gupta, Yann Lecun | Announced |
Vercept has raised $16.0M in total across 1 funding round.
Vercept's investors include Acrew Capital, Alumni Ventures, Coelius Capital, Craft Ventures, ENIAC Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, Tiffany Luck, Pear VC, Rock Yard Ventures, Saga, Y Combinator, Claire Hughes Johnson.
Vercept is an AI technology company building Vy, an on-device AI-powered computer interface that enables natural language task automation directly on users' machines, eliminating traditional clicking, shortcuts, or menu navigation.[1][2] Vy serves individual users and professionals seeking to automate repetitive tasks with high accuracy, zero configuration, and strong privacy by operating locally without cloud dependencies or integrations like Slack or Google Drive.[2] It solves the problem of inefficient human-computer interaction by allowing users to simply describe needs—e.g., "Hi James, what would you like to do today?"—freeing time for high-value work while keeping sensitive data private.[1][2] Backed by a world-class founding team from AI2, Meta AI, Apple, and Stripe, Vercept shows strong early momentum through user demos, Discord community engagement, and enthusiastic testimonials like "This is literally insane!" signaling viral potential in AI agent adoption.[1][2]
Vercept emerged from a powerhouse founding team of AI experts deeply rooted in cutting-edge research and engineering. The CEO, previously a Senior Research Scientist at the Allen Institute for AI (AI2), led work in computer vision, deep learning, and AI agents, with recent top papers at CoRL 2024 (Poliformer), IROS 2024 (HarmonicMM), and ICRA 2024 (RT-X), holding a Ph.D. from UW CSE.[1] The co-founder served as Research Manager and Infrastructure Team Lead at AI2, spearheading AI agents and reinforcement learning projects like PoliFormer, SPOC, and AllenAct, with a UW Stats Ph.D. and UC Berkeley Math valedictorian background.[1] Another co-founder, the 18th most cited person in scientific history, pioneered deep learning in computer vision (Faster R-CNN, Mask R-CNN, Segment Anything) at Meta AI, AI2, and UC Berkeley.[1] Supporting members include a former Apple MLR Research Scientist who built embodied multimodal agents and EvalAI (hosting 450+ AI challenges), Ph.D. from Georgia Tech, and a former Head of Engineering at Copy.ai (scaling to 17M+ users), with prior CTO roles at Stripe, NextStep, Urbanspoon (acquired by Zomato), and Audiosocket.[1] The idea for Vy likely crystallized from their collective expertise in on-device AI agents, transitioning research into a practical, privacy-first product amid rising demand for local AI execution.
Vercept rides the surging wave of on-device AI agents, capitalizing on trends like multimodal AI, embodied agents, and privacy concerns driving edge computing over cloud reliance. Timing is ideal post-2024 breakthroughs in agentic AI (e.g., their CoRL/IROS papers), as enterprises and consumers demand tools that act autonomously amid data sovereignty regulations and latency issues with remote models.[1][2] Market forces favoring Vercept include exploding demand for productivity automation—evident in Copy.ai's 17M-user scale—and hardware advances enabling powerful local inference on laptops, positioning Vy to disrupt GUI paradigms entrenched since the 1980s.[1][2] By fostering open knowledge-sharing and philanthropy, Vercept influences the ecosystem toward accessible, ethical AI, potentially accelerating adoption in underrepresented groups and education while challenging incumbents like cloud assistants.[1]
Vercept's Vy positions it as a frontrunner in the AI interface revolution, with on-device agents set to redefine computing as profoundly as the mouse did. Next steps likely include expanding multimodal capabilities (building on founders' vision/RL expertise), enterprise features for teams, and Discord-driven community growth into a robust ecosystem.[1][2] Trends like cheaper local LLMs, regulatory privacy pushes, and agent benchmarks (e.g., EvalAI heritage) will propel Vy, evolving its influence from niche innovator to mainstream staple—perhaps powering "Vy-only" laptops as users rave. This human-potential expander, born from AI's elite, could make Vercept the go-to for tomorrow's seamless digital lives, echoing its opening promise of transparency and real value.
