Startups & Funding
CopilotKit raises $27 million to expand its AI agent platform
Seattle-based CopilotKit raised $27 million in a Series A round to scale its open-source protocol and enterprise tools for deploying app-native AI agents.
Co-founded by CEO Atai Barkai and Head of Growth Uli Barkai, Seattle-based startup CopilotKit has raised $27 million in a Series A funding round to scale its developer tools for app-native AI agents—which are AI agents that live inside applications. The funding round was led by Glilot Capital, NFX, and SignalFire. The company plans to use the capital to expand its team and accelerate the deployment of its tools.
The startup is positioning itself against vertically integrated competitors, such as Vercel and OpenAI, by taking a horizontal approach. In this context, a horizontal approach means supporting various frameworks and backends rather than forcing developers into a single platform. According to co-founder and CEO Atai Barkai, the startup’s framework is designed to address two key demands from enterprise clients: optionality and self-hosting. Barkai noted that these features are typically unavailable in vertically integrated alternatives like the Vercel stack. “If there are two things we hear in almost every single enterprise conversation, enterprises want optionality and they want self-hosting, and these are two things that they don’t really get in the Vercel stack,” Barkai said.
CopilotKit’s core offering is built around AG-UI, an open-source protocol that connects AI agents to user interfaces. The protocol is supported by AI infrastructure providers including Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle, alongside frameworks such as LangChain, Mastra, PydanticAI, and Agno. According to Atai Barkai, CopilotKit and the AG-UI protocol see millions of installs per week. Barkai also stated that a large portion of Fortune 500 companies are currently using the protocol and the startup’s tools in production. The company’s enterprise customers include:
- Deutsche Telekom
- Docusign
- Cisco
- S&P Global
The company currently has about 25 employees and plans to use the new funding to grow its headcount. To support its enterprise push, the company offers CopilotKit Enterprise Intelligence, a self-hostable enterprise toolkit for deploying AI agents. CopilotKit’s business model relies on keeping its core protocol open-source while monetizing enterprise-grade features. According to Uli Barkai, the startup’s head of growth, the strategy is to become the default choice in the developer ecosystem, allowing 95% of users to build and get started without paying, while monetizing the top enterprises.
Why it matters
CopilotKit is positioning itself as a horizontal, enterprise-friendly alternative to vertically integrated AI platforms by offering optionality and self-hosting capabilities for developers building AI agents.