Convergence secures $12M pre-seed to build personal AI agents with long-term memory

Convergence, the startup building personal AI agents for everyday use, has secured $12 million in pre-seed funding led by Balderton Capital, with participation from Salesforce Ventures and Shopify Ventures.

The funding will fuel the development of innovative models for its Proxy assistants, aiming to surpass current AI capabilities by focusing on continuous learning and skill acquisition through memory.

Launched in April 2024 by machine learning engineers Marvin Purtorab (CEO) and Andy Toulis (CTO), Convergence is reshaping the way we interact with software. Proxy pairs users with personalised AI agents that learn tasks and workflows, significantly reducing administrative burdens and boosting productivity. To illustrate, a typical employee loses 62% of their day to repetitive tasks – areas where Proxy excels.

Beyond the workplace, Proxy is designed to serve consumers, offering a personal AI agent that can handle tasks like booking holidays or managing grocery orders. Convergence has released Proxy in beta, with limited spots available for early users.

The founding team brings deep experience and expertise. Marvin and Andy, who met while working on AI systems at Shopify, later joined Cohere, an enterprise AI platform, before founding Convergence. In just three months, they’ve assembled a team of specialists from Google DeepMind, Meta, and PolyAI, driving the rapid development from concept to product launch.

What sets Proxy apart is its versatility. Unlike AI agents tailored to specific tasks, Proxy learns across domains, acquiring new skills through long-term memory and continual learning. This breakthrough is powered by Large Meta Learning Models (LMLM), designed to teach the AI how to learn, enabling it to adapt like a human.

Marvin Purtorab, Co-Founder and CEO of Convergence, said: “Imagine an agent that keeps growing and learning whenever you teach them something new. Over time, the agent will take on mundane tasks allowing you to focus on higher-level tasks that are more impactful and also more enjoyable. The key to our approach is the ability for Proxy to learn and memorise tasks on the job, remembering them for the long term and being able to use its memories to extrapolate to new tasks – just as a person would. Our mission at Convergence is to build new, foundationally different technologies that are a clear pathway to useful intelligence. Balderton shares our vision deeply and we are looking forward to turning it into a reality with them.”

Andy Toulis, Co-Founder and CTO of Convergence, said: “We’re building a future where people and Proxies are collaborating every day on the job. There’s unlimited potential in human-machine collaboration – together, we’ll solve important problems for humanity. We’re excited to be building this in London which has some of the best AI talent in the world.”

James Wise, Partner at Balderton Capital, said: “Few people have the experience and skill that Marvin and Andy have, which makes them well-placed to take on the complex technical challenge of a product like Proxy. In only a few short months, they have built a stellar team and are ready to ship a remarkable product that could transform how we live and work. I look forward to being a part of their growth journey.”