A founder who was an early mover in the race to build autonomous vehicles has raised $15 million for his next act: a startup that claims its AI can write enterprise software on its own.
Cogna -- as the U.K.-based startup is called -- is led by Ben Peters, the technical co-founder of FiveAI (the self-driving startup that was acquired by Bosch in 2022). Notion Capital is leading the Series A, with Hoxton Ventures and Chalfen Ventures also participating. It comes on the heels of Cogna, founded in May 2023, raising a seed round of $4.75 million earlier this year from a number of investors, including Peters' FiveAI co-founder Stan Boland and Herman Hauser, the founder of Acorn Software.
The focus of Cogna is the world of enterprise resource planning. ERP is a dry but very necessary software component in the running of organizations, covering everything from procurement and supply chain and inventory management through to risk assessments, finance and human resources. Typically large enterprises can pay up to billions of dollars in contracts with systems integrators and consultancies to handle their ERP, either by customizing off-the-shelf software for clients, or writing custom applications from the ground up, to fit an organization's particular needs.
In typical AI startup fashion, Peters believes that this work is best done, and can be compressed into, an AI platform built for the purpose. While some challenges have been significantly trickier for AI to address than others, there have been some early signs of ERP potentially being one area where it might stick, and for Cogna to potentially become one of the players delivering on that pitch. A year since launch, Cogna has signed up customers that include the U.K. gas distributor Cadent Gas and infrastructure and utilities service provider Network Plus.
"To be clear, none of our customers think of it a ...