IrisGo, a startup backed by Andrew Ng, looks to become the AI desktop buddy you never knew you needed

Summary

Industry insiders say the next big thing in AI is “proactive” systems: agents that can anticipate a user’s needs — and fulfill them — before the user even knows what those needs are. One startup that’s looking to make headway in this area is IrisGo. The company, which closed a $2.8 million seed round led by Andrew Ng’s AI Fund earlier this year, is building a desktop companion for PCs that can learn about a user’s daily workflows and then automate them with limited to no human prompting. Iris was co-founded by Jeffrey Lai, a former Apple engineer who helped to build the Chinese language version of Siri, the company’s automated assistant. (Somewhat slyly, Iris is Siri spelled backwards.) The core idea is simple: show Iris how to do something once, and it remembers that process for future automated use — no repeat instructions needed. During a conversation with TechCrunch, Lai ran a demo, showing how Iris could learn to place a coffee order online. As I watched, Iris recorded the steps it took to select a latte from Philz Coffee (a popular Bay Area chain), fill out credit card information, and then hit purchase. Lai then asked Iris to repeat the order on its own; the agent dutifully complied. Buying coffee, of course, is not really the point. Instead, the hope is that the system will automate a whole host of business-related tasks. Iris comes with a built-in “skills” library — things like email drafting, invoice processing, report building, document summarization, and many other ready-to-use automated workflows. At the same time, Iris learns from the user’s desktop behavior and automatically adds those tasks to its potential list of action items. The application also includes a coding assistant — similar in concept to OpenAI’s Codex or Anthropic’s Claude Code — designed to assist developers as they go about their work. “Our target audience is knowledge workers — white collar companies. There’s a lot of repetitive tasks that those workers do every day,” Lai said, notin...