The archive · AI & Models · Strategic decision · 2022–2024
Adept's $1B 'AI teammate' bet ended in Amazon's June 2024 acqui-hire
Adept bet AI models should act in software, not just chat; after $415M and a viral ACT-1 demo, Amazon hired its founders and licensed the tech.
Adept
What the business is
Adept trained action models — AI that operates software the way a human does, through clicks, keystrokes and scrolling. Its ACT-1 prototype showed an overlay controlling Chrome, Salesforce and other tools from natural-language instructions.
Starting capital：Over $415M raised: $65M Series A (Apr 2022) and $350M Series B (Mar 2023) at ~$1B valuation
How it started
Founded Jan 5, 2022 in San Francisco by David Luan (ex-OpenAI VP of Engineering) with co-founders including transformer-paper co-authors Ashish Vaswani and Niki Parmar. Its thesis: language models were impressive but passive; the next step was 'useful general intelligence' that does anything a human can do at a computer (AI Wiki).
What happened
Adept showed ACT-1 in Sept 2022 and raised a $350M Series B in March 2023 at roughly $1B with strategic investors Microsoft, Nvidia, Atlassian and Workday, while keeping only ~25 employees (TechCrunch). It open-sourced Persimmon-8B and Fuyu-8B, then built an enterprise workflows product. But Vaswani and Parmar had left in 2023 to found Essential AI, and the startup 'struggled to bring any product to market despite months and months of testing' (TechCrunch, June 2024).
How it ended up
On June 28, 2024 Amazon hired CEO David Luan, several co-founders and roughly two-thirds of Adept's ~100 staff, and licensed its tech for a reported ~$25M — a 'reverse acqui-hire' Reuters compared to Microsoft's Inflection deal, with FTC scrutiny. A ~20-person remnant under new CEO Zach Brock kept the company alive on paper, but the original venture — its own foundation models and agent product — was over (TechCrunch; Reuters; AI Wiki).
Background
Adept was founded in January 2022 on the bet that the next AI platform would not be a chatbot but an 'AI teammate' — a foundation model trained on how people actually use computers that could perform actions across software. Co-founder David Luan, a former OpenAI VP of Engineering, assembled a team that included two co-authors of the transformer paper, and the company publicly demonstrated ACT-1, an overlay that operated Chrome, Salesforce and other tools from plain-language instructions (TechCrunch; AI Wiki).
The demo made Adept one of the most watched AI startups of 2023. In March 2023 it raised a $350M Series B at roughly a $1B valuation, bringing total funding to $415M, with Microsoft, Nvidia, Atlassian and Workday among its backers (TechCrunch). Yet the promise stayed a prototype: two co-founders left in 2023, and by mid-2024 TechCrunch reported the startup 'struggled to bring any product to market despite months and months of testing.'
The end came on June 28, 2024: Amazon hired Luan, several co-founders and roughly two-thirds of Adept's staff, and licensed its technology — a reverse acqui-hire Reuters likened to Microsoft's Inflection deal, one that drew FTC scrutiny. About 20 employees remained under a new CEO, but Adept's original bet — building its own foundation models and an agent product — was effectively finished (TechCrunch; Reuters).
What has to be true
- Adept is the cleanest 'action model' bet: the founders wagered that agents, not chatbots, would define AI — the demo proved the thesis technically, yet the company still failed to ship.
- The $415M war chest and ~$1B valuation did not translate into product-market fit, which is why the outcome is instructive rather than a funding story.
- The Amazon deal shows how reverse acqui-hires end ventures: talent and tech leave, investors roughly recoup, and the startup survives only as a remnant.
- The arc is documented end-to-end in first-hand and press records: Adept's Series B announcement, TechCrunch's product-market reporting, and Reuters' deal coverage.
What can be applied
A great-sounding AI thesis and a unicorn valuation don't ship a product; when a cloud giant offers an exit for talent and tech, the founders take it and the venture is gutted in a day.
Aftermath
As of 2026-09-02 Adept exists only as a ~20-person remnant under CEO Zach Brock that pivoted to licensing agent technology; the FTC inquiry into the Amazon deal had produced no formal enforcement action as of March 2026, and by February 2026 four of the five Adept co-founders who joined Amazon had already left the company (AI Wiki). Amazon's AGI Lab, briefly led by David Luan, shipped Nova Act in March 2025 — a direct descendant of Adept's ACT-1 vision.
Sources
- Adept, a startup training AI to use existing software and APIs, raises $350M
- Amazon hires founders away from AI startup Adept
- Amazon lures cofounders from startup Adept to bolster AI efforts
- Adept AI — company history, funding and aftermath
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