IrisGo Raises $2.8M from Andrew Ng to Build Proactive AI Desktop Assistant
IrisGo, a startup co-founded by former Apple engineer Jeffrey Lai, has closed a $2.8 million seed round led by Andrew Ng's AI Fund to develop a proactive desktop AI companion. The system learns user workflows by demonstration and automates repetitive tasks with minimal prompting. IrisGo's beta apps for macOS and Windows recently launched, and the company has secured a preinstall deal with Acer. The application includes a skills library for email drafting, invoice processing, and document summarization, as well as a coding assistant similar to OpenAI's Codex. IrisGo processes data on-device for privacy, with cloud processing only when authorized and encrypted. Nvidia and Google have also backed the company. Lai, an alumnus of Carnegie Mellon University like Ng, pitched Iris during a meeting arranged through that shared connection.
Key facts
- IrisGo raised a $2.8 million seed round led by Andrew Ng's AI Fund.
- Jeffrey Lai co-founded IrisGo; he previously worked on Siri's Chinese language version at Apple.
- IrisGo's AI learns workflows by demonstration and automates them with minimal prompting.
- The application includes a skills library for tasks like email drafting and invoice processing.
- IrisGo also features a coding assistant akin to OpenAI's Codex or Anthropic's Claude Code.
- Data is processed on-device for privacy; cloud processing is user-authorized and encrypted.
- Nvidia and Google have invested in IrisGo.
- IrisGo launched beta versions for macOS and Windows and struck a preinstall deal with Acer.
Entities
Institutions
- IrisGo
- Andrew Ng's AI Fund
- Apple
- Carnegie Mellon University
- Nvidia
- Acer
- TechCrunch
- Philz Coffee
- OpenAI
- Anthropic