Former Snowflake execs raise $5M for agentic AI that simplifies data operations

Genesis Computing Inc., a startup building generative and agentic artificial intelligence capabilities for use with cloud data management platforms, today said it has raised $5 million in seed funding.

The company, which was founded last April by two former Snowflake Inc. executives, said it will use the funding to develop and sell AI agents that streamline the process of setting up and managing complex data pipelines.

Its first two agents analyze and optimize Snowflake databases and deploy and orchestrate generative bots. The initial iterations, introduced in June, were primarily question-answering bots that help users through manually intensive tasks such as building engineering pipelines.

The next generation will automate many of those tasks without requiring direct human intervention. Co-founder and Chief Executive Matthew Glickman likened them to OpenAI LLC’s Operator, and AI agent that can perform tasks on the user’s behalf.

“Data pipelines are complex and uses haven’t lent themselves to AI,” he said. “These thinking models change the game. They can build and maintain pipelines for us.” They also proactively monitor, identify and resolve issues to ensure high-data quality and reduce downtime and enable nontechnical users to run advanced data queries.

Plug and play

Genesis pretrains its agents to handle common data management tasks. Once installed, they go to work mapping and organizations data architecture and tackling increasingly complex tasks as they learn. “The goal is for the customer to turn on the system, connect to the tools and the agent figures things out on its own,” Glickman said.

Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Justin Langseth said agents can discover relationships that would take human operators weeks or months to define.

“If I want to build a new pipeline with 10 fields, the agents will research each field, look at the source data, take institutional knowledge and propose a table join,” he said. “The agents look at existing projects that are part of the production pipelines, at each field in depth and how they tie together. They can do this in parallel and build the pipeline very quickly.”

The Genesis agents were built on Snowflake’s Cortex AI, a suite of AI and machine learning features that enable organizations to easily incorporate AI capabilities into their data operations. However, the architecture is model-agnostic and also works on non-Snowflake platform such as Amazon Web Services Inc.’s RedShift and Google LLC’s BigQuery.

Future plans are to support the Dagster cloud-native data pipeline orchestrator and Data Build Tool, an open-source analytics engineering tool that enables data transformation within cloud data warehouses. Genesis recently added support for Google Sheets for project tracking and also integrates with Microsoft Corp. Teams and Salesforce Inc.’s Slack.

That’s part of the overall goal of making the agents as autonomous as possible, limiting human interactions to asking questions or solving problems.

“You don’t want to have to watch every step” of an agent’s operations, Langseth said. “You want the agent to do its thing and reach out to a human when it needs an answer to a question.”

Investors include Kearny Jackson LLC, Snowflakes Ventures LLC, Venture Partners LLC, SaaS Ventures LLC, DNX Ventures, Eval Ventures LLC and former Snowflake CEO Bob Muglia.