Many of the world’s largest software companies can’t stop talking about AI agents. Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff is so enthusiastic about the advent of these AI assistants—which can, in theory, automate everything from handling customer service inquiries to ordering inventory—that he's said he considered renaming his entire company Agentforce. Microsoft is touting the idea of AI agents as the future of computing. Both Amazon’s AWS cloud platform and Google’s Vertex cloud service are pitching the ability of customers to build agents too.
But one tiny U.K. startup founded by a team of former Palantir engineers thinks it can beat these behemoths to become the platform for companies that want to coordinate large teams of these AI agents.
The company is called Fern Labs, and today it emerged from operating in stealth with its first product and the announcement of a pre-seed funding round of $3 million. The funding is led by London-based Air Street Capital, which invests only in AI-related companies.
Ash Edwards, who cofounded the company and is its CEO, spent three years as a technical lead at Palantir—the software company best known for helping intelligence agencies analyze vast quantities of data—where he worked initially on conventional machine learning applications and later on research into AI agents. Fern’s other two cofounders are Taylor Young, who was also a technical lead at Palantir, and Alex Goddijn, who was an engineer at the company.
Edwards said that his experience at Palantir convinced him of the need for a research lab solely focused on the issue of building and coordinating teams of AI agents across a company.
