Arga is building a better way to train enterprise AI agents

Making AI agents work is turning out to be a lot harder than many companies expected. Luckily for them, there’s help on the way: A new crop of startups is finding better ways to test and train agents before they are deployed, particularly on the complexities of the modern enterprise.

Arga is one such company. The startup on Wednesday said it had raised $10 million in a seed funding round that was led by General Catalyst, with participation from Box Group, Emergence, Gradient and SV Angel.

Arga builds training environments for enterprise software like Salesforce, Workday, and email clients. Where most testing environments offer a stateless API endpoint, Arga builds a full-scale digital twin of the program, effectively cloning the entire software with permission systems and web hooks intact. The result is a more robust way to train agents across multiple systems.

The startup’s CEO and co-founder Philip Li illustrated his product with the example of a prospective client creating a lead in Salesforce while a colleague reaches out separately through Hubspot. 

“Can the agent correctly identify that these two are the same company?” Li says, “Are they able to check whether or not they’ve only sent the email once? Are they able to identify who to send the email to out of the two opportunities?”