Seattle’s CopilotKit raises $27M, as some of the biggest names in tech take on the AI agent protocol – GeekWire
CopilotKit, a Seattle startup with roots in the former Techstars Seattle accelerator, has raised $27 million for technology that allows AI agents to work within existing software applications.
The company created AG-UI, an open standard for how AI agents interact with software, allowing agents to create interactive charts, update dashboards, and perform actions within applications.
Companies including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle have adopted the protocol. CopilotKit says more than half of the Fortune 500 use its tools, mostly through open source projects but also as paying customers of its enterprise product, CopilotKit Enterprise Intelligence.
Founded in 2023 by brothers Atai Barkai and Uli Barkai, and originally incorporated as Tawkit Inc., CopilotKit has about 20 employees.
The funding, announced Tuesday, is led by Glilot Capital, NFX, and SignalFire. It includes $20 million in new Series A capital and $7 million in a previously unannounced seed round.
Headquartered in Seattle, most of the engineering team is based locally. The company plans to use the new funding in part to expand its Seattle team.
AG-UI (Agent-User Interaction) is part of an emerging field of AI protocols including MCP (Model Context Protocol), which connects agents to external tools; and A2A (Agent-to-Agent), which connects agents with other agents. AG-UI handles a different part of the process, connecting agents to human users within the software through application interfaces.
CopilotKit’s core tools are open source, with over 40,000 GitHub stars and what the company says are millions of installs per week.
The startup is monetizing CopilotKit Enterprise Intelligence, a self-hosted product that adds continuous chat, analytics, and real-time learning capabilities. Notable enterprise clients include Deutsche Telekom, Docusign, Cisco, and S&P Global.
Atai Barkai, the company’s CEO, previously worked in media infrastructure at Meta and led the development of leading iOS apps at Doximity. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics from the University of Pennsylvania. Uli Barkai leads growth and collaboration and studied financial economics at Columbia and philosophy at Tel Aviv University.
The two tawkitAI originally founded as an AI-powered podcast platform and pursued copy development tools after opening up their internal infrastructure and seeing strong interest from developers. They joined Techstars Seattle’s 2023 cohort and later renamed the company CopilotKit.
CopilotKit competes with Vercel’s AI SDK, Assistant-ui, and OpenAI’s Apps SDK, among others. The company differentiates itself as a horizontal, vendor-neutral alternative that works with any agent framework, cloud provider, or backend the company already uses.
