As Cohere and Writer Explore the ‘Living AI’ Arena, Pathway Joins the Group with a $10 Million Round

As large enterprises struggle to include AI into their platforms and processes, they’ve run into a problem: Generative AI should have memory and its training data should be consistently updated to be of any practical use. This area is currently called “Live AI” and many startups operate in it, including: Cohere AND Writer. Other, Pathjust raised a $10 million seed round to construct working artificial intelligence systems that the company says think and learn in real time like humans.

The round was led by TQ Ventures, with participation from Kadmos, Innovo, Market One Capital, Id4 and business angels. Another investor in Pathway is Łukasz Kaiser, co-author Transformers and key researcher behind GPT o1 from OpenAI.

Pathway’s offering includes so-called “infrastructure components” that power running AI systems and feed structured and unstructured data, meaning enterprise AI platforms could make decisions based on up-to-date knowledge. Current clients include NATO and the French post office La Poste.

Zuzanna Stamirowska, co-founder and CEO of Pathway, told TechCrunch on a call: “The way deep learning assistants and LLM work is that you take training data and then train models. But the question is: how to deal with knowledge, how to deal with memory? At this point, the LLM is behaving a bit like a very smart intern on his first day of work who has been offered a book to read. But they can’t actually remember it. Besides, it’s not live, it’s static.”

To address this, she said Pathway “enables developers to build a pipeline through which they can feed live data into AI systems.” Right now, we’re doing this in the prompting stage whenever you’re constructing LLM applications or Gen AI applications.

Stamirowska — who’s moving to Menlo Park, California — has assembled a formidable, highly technical team to attain the startup’s goals. Its co-founders are CSO Adrian Kosowski and CTO Jan Chorowski, who previously worked with recent Nobel Prize winner in physics and “godfather of artificial intelligence” Geoff Hinton. Stamirowska herself is the writer of a cutting-edge forecasting model for the complex network occurring in maritime trade, published by the US Academy of Sciences.

“The company started with an idea that popped into my head one sunny morning in Chicago,” she said. “I used to be there accompanying a friend to a research conference on theoretical computer science… We had an argument and I said I had to begin with myself. So I took out my laptop and began writing to people in my network about move things forward. I still remember the taste of coffee from that moment.

I asked her where she sees Pathway in comparison with other startups in the space? “For applications in GenAI engineering and knowledge management, Cohere and Writer appear alongside us in Gartner’s newest quadrants,” she said. “Whereas in enterprise deals we often see Palantir bidding on AI transformation, although they are less product-oriented than we are.”

Commenting in a statement, Schuster Tanger, co-managing partner and co-founder of TQ Ventures, said: “Zuzanna and the Pathway team have cutting-edge knowledge and expertise in one of the most exciting areas of business today… The recent, and almost at least, response from the developer community has been powerful.”