French startup Pathway, which builds live AI systems that think and learn in real-time as humans do, has raised $10 million in seed funding. The round was led by TQ Ventures (which backed Oxla and Distrubusion), with participation from Kadmos, Inovo, Market One Capital and Id4, as well as several high-profile angel investors. They join Lukasz Kaiser, the company’s very first backer, who is the co-author of Transformers (the “T” in ChatGPT) and the key researcher behind GPT o1 from OpenAI.
The funding will enable the next step in Pathway’s mission to create live AI systems capable of complex reasoning.
Develops live AI systems
Pathway was founded by Zuzanna Stamirowska, Claire Nouet, Adrian Kosowski and Jan Chorowski, the co-author of the Nobel Prize winner, Geoff Hinton. Live AI refers to AI systems that process and respond to data in real time, adapting dynamically to changes in their environment. Unlike traditional AI systems, which often work on static datasets and provide results after processing, live AI systems continuously ingest, analyse, and learn from live streams of structured and unstructured data.
Underpinned by the fastest data processing engine on the market, Pathway’s offering includes infrastructure components that fuel live AI systems from dynamic sources of structured and unstructured data, enabling decision-making based on always up-to-date knowledge.
The enterprise-grade, secure solution empowers even those organisations holding highly sensitive data to embrace operational speed AI. Its growing customer base includes businesses in regulated industries with complex data requirements, including NATO and La Poste. Pathway also boasts an enthusiastic, rapidly growing developer community in over 100 countries.
What holds for its future?
Pathway’s innovative focus on live AI systems positions it as a transformative player in real-time, reasoning-based intelligence. By enabling complex decision-making from dynamic, sensitive data, it has a good potential in regulated industries like defence, logistics, and enterprise applications. Its infrastructure components could shape the evolution of large language models (LLMs) by integrating real-time reasoning capabilities.
Some of its notable competitors include Cohere, which specialises in NLP and LLMs for text processing and enterprise applications, and Writer, a writing platform helping businesses and teams create high-quality, consistent, and brand-aligned content.
Zuzanna Stamirowska, Co-Founder and CEO of Pathway, said: “Live AI will be a critical enabler of the next generation of LLMs that support complex reasoning. Today, we empower organizations with complex, changing data sets to embrace real-time intelligence. This funding will help us create the missing components that will enable all enterprises, even those holding the most sensitive data, to address issues they’ve never been able to solve before.”
Schuster Tanger, Co-Managing Partner and Co-founder at TQ Ventures, commented: “Zuzanna and the team at Pathway possess bleeding-edge insights and expertise in one of the most exciting fields in modern business. Pathway’s success in sophisticated undertakings such as helping La Poste manage operational disruptions at the Paris Olympics is encouraging. Last and hardly least, the response from the developer community has been powerful.”
