Seattle’s CopilotKit raises $27M, as some of the biggest names in tech adopt its AI agent protocol

CopilotKit, a Seattle startup with roots in the former Techstars Seattle accelerator, has raised $27 million for technology that lets AI agents work inside existing software applications.

The company created AG-UI, an open standard for how AI agents communicate with software, letting agents generate interactive charts, update dashboards, and take actions inside apps. 

Companies including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle have adopted the protocol. CopilotKit says more than half of the Fortune 500 use its tools, primarily through the open-source project but also as paying customers of its enterprise product, CopilotKit Enterprise Intelligence.

Co-founded in 2023 by brothers Atai Barkai and Uli Barkai, and originally incorporated as Tawkit Inc., CopilotKit has about 20 employees.

The funding, announced Tuesday, was led by Glilot Capital, NFX, and SignalFire. It includes $20 million in new Series A capital and $7 million in a previously unannounced seed round.

The startup is headquartered in Seattle, with most of its engineering team based locally. The company plans to use the new funding in part to expand its Seattle team.

AG-UI (Agent-User Interaction) is part of an emerging field of AI protocols that also includes MCP (Model Context Protocol), which connects agents to external tools; and A2A (Agent-to-Agent), which connects agents to other agents. AG-UI handles a different part of the process, connecting agents to human users inside software through application interfaces.

CopilotKit’s core tools are open source, with more than 40,000 GitHub stars and what the company says are millions of installs per week. 

The startup generates revenue through CopilotKit Enterprise Intelligence, a self-hosted product that adds persistent conversation threads, analytics, and real-time learning capabilities. Named enterprise customers include Deutsche Telekom, Docusign, Cisco, and S&P Global.

Atai Barkai, the company’s CEO, previously worked on media infrastructure at Meta and led development of flagship iOS apps at Doximity. He holds bachelor’s and master’s degrees in physics from the University of Pennsylvania. Uli Barkai heads growth and partnerships and studied financial economics at Columbia and philosophy at Tel Aviv University. 

The two originally co-founded tawkitAI as an AI-powered podcast platform and pivoted to copilot development tools after open-sourcing their internal infrastructure and seeing strong developer interest. They joined Techstars Seattle’s 2023 cohort and later renamed the company CopilotKit.

CopilotKit competes with Vercel’s AI SDK, Assistant-ui, and OpenAI’s Apps SDK, among others. The company differentiates itself as a horizontal, vendor-neutral alternative that works with whatever agent framework, cloud provider, or backend a company already uses.

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