As Cohere and Writer mine the ‘Live AI’ arena, Pathway joins the pack with a $10M round

As large enterprises grapple with how to incorporate AI into their platforms and processes, they have encountered a problem: Generative AI needs to have memory and its training data must be constantly updated for it to have any practical use. This area is now called ‘Live AI’ and a number of startups are working in the space, including Cohere and Writer. Another, Pathway, has just raised a $10 million Seed round to build live AI systems that, claims the company, think and learn in real-time as humans do. 

The round was led by TQ Ventures, with participation from Kadmos, Innovo, Market One Capital, Id4 and angel investors. Another investor in Pathway includes Lukasz Kaiser, the co-author of Transformers and a key researcher behind GPT o1 from OpenAI.

Pathway’s offering includes what it calls ‘infrastructure components’ that power live AI systems, feeding on structured and unstructured data, meaning that enterprise AI platforms can make decisions on up-to-date knowledge.  Customers so far include NATO and La Poste, the French post office. 

Zuzanna Stamirowska, Co-Founder and CEO of Pathway, told TechCrunch over a call: “The way deep learning and LLM assistants are working, is that you take the training data and then you train models. But the question is, how to deal with knowledge, how to deal with memory? Right now an LLM acts like a bit like a very smart intern on the first day of his job, being offered a book to read. But they can’t really memorize it. Plus, it’s not live, it’s stactic.”

To remedy this, she said Pathway “enables developers to build a pipeline where they can feed-in live data into the AI systems. Right now we do it during the prompting stage of when you build LLM applications or Gen AI applications.”

Stamirowska — who is moving to Menlo Park, California — has assembled an impressive, highly technical team to achieve the startup’s goals. Her co-founders are CSO Adrian Kosowski and CTO Jan Chorowski, who previously worked with recent physics Nobel Prize winner and the “Godfather of AI”, Geoff Hinton. Stamirowska herself is the author of a state-of-the-art forecasting model for a complex network that was in the maritime trade, published by the Academy of Sciences of the US. 

“The company started with an idea that popped up in my head on one sunny morning in Chicago,” she said. “I was there accompanying a friend to a scientific conference in theoretical computer science… We had a small disagreement, and I said I have to my start my own thing. So, I took out my laptop and started writing to people in my network about how to move this forward. I still remember the taste of the coffee at that moment.”

I asked her where she sees Pathway as against other startups in the space? “For use cases in GenAI engineering and knowledge management, Cohere and Writer appear beside us in the latest Gartner Quadrants,” she said. “Whereas in enterprise  deals, we often encounter Palantir for AI transformation tenders, although they are less product-oriented than we are.”

Commenting in a statement, Schuster Tanger, Co-Managing Partner and Co-founder at TQ Ventures, said: “Zuzanna and the team at Pathway possess bleeding-edge insights and expertise in one of the most exciting fields in modern business… Last and hardly least, the response from the developer community has been powerful.”