Exclusive: Ex-Meta AI leaders debut an agent that scours the web for you in a push to ultimately give users their own digital ‘chief of staff’

The trio is widely regarded as among the world’s most elite AI talent.  All three are veteran ex-Meta researchers who helped lead the company’s high-profile generative AI efforts—and before that, ran labs together at Georgia Tech. 

Devi Parikh led Meta’s multimodal AI research team. Dhruv Batra headed up embodied AI, building models that help robots navigate the physical world. And Abhishek Das was a research scientist at Meta’s Fundamental AI Research lab, or FAIR.

A year ago, Parikh and Das left Meta to launch Yutori, a startup named after the Japanese word for the mental spaciousness that comes from having room to think. Batra joined a couple of months later. 

Now, investors are betting big on the team’s vision for Yutori. Radical Ventures, Felicis, and a roster of top AI angels—including Elad Gil, Sarah Guo, Jeff Dean, and Fei-Fei Li—have backed Yutori’s $15 million seed round. The mission: to rethink how people interact with  AI agents—where the software, not the user, is the one doing the surfing to accomplish tasks like an AI ‘chief of staff.’

Taking daily digital chores off your plate

“The web is simultaneously one of humanity’s greatest inventions—and really, really clunky,” said Parikh. Yutori’s long-term dream, she explained, is to build AI personal assistants—in the form of web agents—that can take daily digital chores off your plate without you lifting a finger, leaving you with time to tackle whatever brings you joy. But to make agents people actually want to use, she said, the entire experience needs a redesign—from product and user interface to technical infrastructure. 

“That’s something that’s harder for larger entities to think through from scratch, since they are incentivized to think about their existing products,” said Parikh, adding that she saw a lot of that at Meta. “We have the luxury to be able to just think from scratch.” 

Parikh explained that Yutori’s focus is on improving  interaction with generative AI.  It should be dynamic and adapt to the task at hand, rather than using a rigid, pre-designed template like a chat box or a web page.

For example, if an AI agent is ordering food on DoorDash for you, it might need to show which restaurants it searched, what menu items it considered, and a few options you can quickly review and confirm. But if that same agent is monitoring the news and generating daily summaries, the format should be entirely different—perhaps organized like a briefing or timeline.

Ultimately, Parikh believes, a system should intelligently decide how to present information and how users can interact with the agent to refine or redirect the task. To get there, Yutori is building on top of existing models, including Meta’s Llama, with a singular focus on agents that can navigate the web and take actions on behalf of a user. 

Today, Yutori announced its first consumer product, Scouts, which the Yutori team explained is like having a team of agents that can monitor the web for anything you care about. Say you’re interested in buying a phone: You want to have a team of agents monitoring the web for whenever there is a discount on the Google Pixel 9. A Scout can notify you when that happens. Or if you are interested in a daily news update on an obscure topic, you can set up a Scout for that.

“Anything of this flavor where you want a team of agents to monitor the web and then notify you, either based on a condition or at a particular time, that’s  the use case we are going after,” said Das. His own very Scout, he explained, is one to reserve tennis courts in San Francisco. He asked his Scout to “Notify me whenever a tennis court in Buena Vista park becomes available for Mondays at 7:30am.” He gets timely notifications over email and he ends up booking the courts. Scouts is free to use, though there is a waitlist for access. 

Unlike traditional search tools – like Google Alerts, for example – Scouts work deeper behind the scenes, autonomously operating browsers and clicking through websites to gather details.  They can also monitor dozens of sites at the same time to find updates. While other companies like OpenAI may be going after the same kind of idea, Batra said that it’s “still early” in the AI agent space and that Yutori is not deterred: “I think we still have a shot.” 

A long-term consumer vision

While Yutori has launched its first product, both the founding team and its investors are clear: the initial $15 million investment is less about this specific release, and more about the team’s bona fides and its long-term consumer vision. For years, the three close friends—Parikh and Batra have also been married since 2010, while Batra advised Das’s PhD—had met weekly over brainstorming dinners and long discussed the possibility of starting a company focused on the future of AI agents. 

“In the early stages of a startup, the quality of the team is the single most important thing—more than the idea, more than the product, more than the market,” said Rob Toews, partner at Radical Ventures, which led Yutori’s seed round and has invested in AI startups including Cohere, Waabi, and Writer. He emphasized that only a “very, very small set of individuals” in the world have the technical depth and creative judgment to build cutting-edge AI systems.

“The Yutori founding team is very much in that upper echelon,” he said, referring to the three cofounders and their initial hires, totaling 15. “It’s just an incredibly dense talent team, top to bottom. Everyone they’ve hired so far is a highly coveted researcher or engineer from places like Meta, Google, and Tesla. Teams of this caliber just don’t come along very often.”

It’s a $15 million bet on what Batra called “an experiment” and “a hypothesis,” explaining that the goal of Scouts is to learn how people actually use autonomous agents in real life—and then iterate quickly. Take an agent that can monitor a gym’s scheduling page every 20 minutes: “No human wants to sit down and do that,” said Das.

For now, Yutori has no plans to charge for its products, but instead to keep experimenting to see what clicks with consumers. Ultimately, the founders say they aren’t selling AI for its own sake, but instead are focused on rethinking not just the tasks agents can take on, but the context in which they operate. Today’s digital assistants are mostly reactive—requiring users to reach for their phones, open an app, and manually explain what they need. Yutori’s vision is to remove that friction by building agents that understand what a user is doing in the moment and can proactively step in to help.

It’s a vision the founders have been working toward since their time at Meta, where they experimented with early versions of smart assistants in Meta’s smart glasses made in partnership with Ray-Ban. At Yutori, they’re continuing that work—testing different ways to deliver helpful support exactly when people need it.

This story was originally featured on Fortune.com