Seattle startup Actual AI raises $3.2M to build AI agents for engineering managers
Geekwire
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Story by Taylor Soper • 20h
AI coding tools are redefining software development and speeding up code generation. They are also creating new management hurdles.
Actual AI wants to help.
The Seattle startup announced a $3.2 million seed round led by AlleyCorp to build out its autonomous agent product designed to help engineering managers adapt to the AI era of development.
While AI coding tools can streamline some software tasks, they are also adding new ones — such as more manual review, coordination tasks, and maintenance challenges, according to Actual AI. Some studies show how AI tools are actually slowing down developers and creating more vulnerabilities.
The company’s agent can automate recurring management duties: triaging issues, generating sprint summaries, routing code reviews, and enforcing architectural consistency.
It’s also designed to help reduce reliance on senior engineers and up-skill junior developers.
“We’re building an engineering manager agent that actually brings guardrails to AI-powered software development,” said CEO John Kennedy.
Actual AI is targeting organizations with 50 to 500 developers. It has 32 active pilots and some early revenue.
“Every engineering manager now manages teams comprised of dozens of developers along with just as many AI agents,” Kenneth Auchenberg, partner at AlleyCorp, said in a statement. “Managers are outnumbered, and it’s created bottlenecks that are killing productivity.”
The six-person company is led by Kennedy, a tech industry vet who worked at Amazon Web Services and Acquia. Co-founder and CTO Ethan Byrd is a former engineer at AWS, Google, Meta, and Microsoft.
Actual AI competes with a number of developer productivity tools from startups and large corporations. Atlassian this month announced plans to acquire developer productivity insight platform DX for $1 billion.
Kennedy said his startup goes beyond traditional dashboards that provide metrics and instead acts on behalf of managers — automating the work itself rather than just reporting on it.
“A lot of engineering managers want to be player-coaches,” Kennedy said. “They want to be spending time with their engineers, up-leveling. They want to be helping with big, hard technical decisions. They want to be doing cool, fun stuff. They don’t want to be doing mechanical admin work.”
Other backers include Irregular Expressions, G2C Ventures, and angel investors such as former Freshworks Americas president Bobby Jaffari and former Shelf Engine CTO Bede Jordan.
Actual AI was previously spotlighted in GeekWire’s Startup Radar series. |
