SAN FRANCISCO, March 27 (Reuters) - Two former Meta

artificial intelligence executives have raised $15

million for Yutori, a startup that will develop AI personal

assistants, the company said on Thursday.

The round was led by Rob Toews at Radical Ventures, with

participation from other investors like Felicis, "AI godmother"

Fei-Fei Li, and Google DeepMind chief scientist Jeff Dean.

San Francisco-based Yutori is part of a slew of AI startups

creating autonomous agents, or systems that use AI to perform

actions on their own. Executives in the field such as OpenAI CFO

Sarah Friar have said such systems will dominate the AI agenda

this year, as models have recently gotten to the point where

they can carry out the longer action sequences necessary to

execute tasks online without human oversight.

"Right now there's a lot happening with chatbots, but

chatbots are not doing things for you in a way that can take

things off your plate," Yutori co-founder Devi Parikh told

Reuters, saying the team has been working to redefine how users

interact with autonomous AI agents, with a focus on improving

efficiency for tasks ranging from online food orders to complex

travel logistics.

Yutori says it is focusing on post-training models to make

them better at navigating the web, or adapting the base models

to hone their performance in specific ways after they have

already been "trained" on reams of generalized data.

Post-training has emerged as a crucial step in the development

of new reasoning models such as OpenAI's o1 and o3 models.

Yutori's team includes Parikh, who led multimodal AI

research at Meta, and Dhruv Batra, who led Meta's embodied AI

research, a team developing models that robots could use to

navigate the 3D physical world. Other team members include the

multimodal post-training leads for Llama 3 and Llama 4, Meta's

flagship open source models.