These young founders just raised $5.2 million from Gradient to teach AI agents how companies work

AI agents are getting better at completing tasks. But one startup says the digital assistants don't actually understand how the companies they're working for operate.

Now, Zeroset has come out of stealth and raised $5.2 million to build models that give AI agents a constantly updated picture of a company's operations.

Zeroset's cofounder and CEO, Akshat Kannan, said today's AI models have little knowledge of the inner workings of an individual business because that information can be scattered across customer relationship management systems, ticketing, and internal docs. Nor are AI models typically trained on a company's proprietary data.

"Models off the shelf have no understanding of the dynamics of how an enterprise actually works," Kannan told Business Insider. "They have no understanding of how the work gets done."

Zeroset's first product, Nebula, connects to software a company already uses, including Microsoft 365, SharePoint, Outlook, Teams, GitHub, and workplace messaging tools. It then tracks how information and activity across those systems change over time.

The idea is to give AI agents more than a pile of company documents to search through. Instead, it wants them to understand the sequence of events and decisions that make up a workflow so that it knows how similar cases were handled previously. It can then do that work autonomously.