Announcing our $8m seed round

Today, we’re announcing our $8m seed round co-led by Afore Capital and Picus Capital, with participation from Focal VC and HF0.

AI will unlock tens of trillions of dollars in economic value, transform entire sectors, and bring an age of abundance like we’ve never seen before.

However, AI adoption has proven very limited and challenging. Models are already capable of automating far more than businesses have put them to use. This is because the people who know how to build effective AI solutions rarely have the operational context of a specific company; and the people who understand that company’s workflows rarely have the expertise to automate them.

Today, forward-deployed engineers help bridge that gap. They embed inside a company, interview employees, shadow their work, and sometimes do the jobs themselves to understand what an automation needs to handle.

We believe that in an AI-native world, this approach is wrong. Interviewing employees is slow, cumbersome, and disruptive. Doing the employees' jobs is slower and as unscalable as it gets. In practice, FDEs are only able to see a fraction of everything that happens inside an organization, and even that is guaranteed to become outdated over time as business needs, orgcharts, and workflows change.

Comprehensive, continuous operational understanding is a prerequisite for AI-first companies. This is why we built Subliminal - an autonomous system which :

1. Observes how work happens. Gather operational data and action logs across the organization, capturing the context behind how tasks are completed.
2. Finds what can be improved. Identify recurring workflows, inefficiencies, and the automation opportunities with the greatest business impact.
3. Builds and deploys automations. Create automations matched to business needs and current model capabilities, testing them against thousands of instances of real work.
4. Keeps improving. As models advance and the business evolves, update existing automations and deploy new ones.

Subliminal was recently deployed at Fella Health ↗, a $300m ARR healthcare startup. Within one week, Subliminal mapped the workflows accounting for 91% of observed work time, giving Fella’s engineers the context to build and deploy automations. In under two months, we helped Fella reach an 85% automation rate across its 200-person customer experience operation, avoiding $3 million in annual hiring costs while increasing customer satisfaction.

We’re now bringing this approach to private equity operating partners and businesses in labor-intensive sectors, where improving operations can unlock capacity, strengthen margins, and support growth across entire portfolios. If this sounds like you, please reach out - and get started today.