Letta, a generative AI startup from UC Berkeley’s AI research lab, has emerged from stealth mode with a $10 million seed funding round. The round was led by Felicis, with participation from Sunflower Capital, Essence VC, and notable angel investors such as Jeff Dean, Clem Delangue, Cristobal Valenzuela, and Robert Nishihara. The company plans to use the funds to develop Letta Cloud, a hosted product that enables developers to build and deploy agents with advanced memory systems.
Letta Cloud offers a hosted agent service, allowing developers to run stateful agents in the cloud via REST APIs. The platform is model agnostic, enabling integration with various model endpoints and running a single agent on multiple models. Letta was co-founded by Charles Packer and Sarah Wooders, who met during their PhD research at UC Berkeley’s Sky Lab under the guidance of advisors Joseph Gonzalez and Ion Stoica.
Both professors are joining Letta’s founding team as advisors. “We are just starting to understand how to build compound AI systems around large foundation models,” said Stoica.
Letta emerges with seed funding
“Charles and Sarah’s PhD research laid the groundwork for how to build these stateful AI systems, and I’m excited to see them continue this research agenda at Letta.”
Packer, Letta’s CEO, believes that the key challenge with agents is understanding how to construct the context window of the LLM, which forms the AI’s memory, and developing an agentic loop around the LLM to manage the context window over time. Letta Cloud also provides an Agent Development Environment (ADE) for developers to create and debug agents by directly viewing and editing the agent’s prompts and memory. This approach to “white-box memory” makes the prompts and memories passed to the LLM transparent to the developer.
“AI memory shouldn’t be a black box. We want to make sure developers have full visibility into the memory and state of their agents, and have full control over what LLMs they want to use,” said Wooders, Letta’s CTO. Astasia Myers, General Partner at Felicis, expressed enthusiasm for supporting Letta in their journey to advance multi-agent AI by building innovative memory systems.
“Letta’s work addresses one of the most pressing challenges in AI today — effective memory management,” she said. Letta is releasing its Agent Developer Environment and API platform for free and onboarding early developers to the beta of its Letta Cloud hosted platform. Developers can install Letta’s open-source software and sign up for the hosted beta at letta.com.
