IrisGo, an Andrew Ng-backed startup, looks to become the AI-powered desktop companion you never knew you needed

Industry insiders say the next big thing in artificial intelligence is… “Proactive” systems.: Agents that can anticipate a user’s needs – and meet them – even before the user knows what those needs are.

One startup looking to make headway in this area is IrisGo. Company that closed Seed round of $2.8 million Led by Andrew Ng’s AI fund earlier this year, the company is building a desktop companion for computers that can learn a user’s daily workflow and then automate it without any human prompting.

Iris was co-founded by Jeffrey Lai, a former Apple engineer who helped build the Chinese version of Siri, the company’s robotic assistant. (Somewhat disingenuously, Iris is Siri spelled backwards.)

The basic idea is simple: Show Iris how to do something once, and she’ll remember that process for future automated use — without having to repeat instructions.

During a conversation with TechCrunch, Lai did a demo showing how Iris can learn how to order coffee online. While watching, Iris recorded the steps she took to select a latte from Philz Coffee (a popular chain in the Bay Area), fill out the credit card information, and then hit the purchase button. Lai then asked Iris to repeat it herself; The agent dutifully complied.

Buying coffee, of course, is not the point. Instead, we hope the system will automate a whole range of business-related tasks. Iris comes with a library of built-in “skills” — things like email drafting, invoice processing, report generation, document summarization, and many other automated workflows that are ready to use. Meanwhile, Iris learns from the user’s desktop behavior and automatically adds those tasks to its list of potential action items.

The app also includes a programming assistant — similar in concept to OpenAI’s Codex or Anthropic’s Claude Code — designed to assist developers as they do their work.

“Our target audience is knowledge workers — white-collar companies. There are a lot of repetitive tasks that these workers do every day,” Lai said, noting that despite the high power of today’s frontier models, AI-assisted office work still feels incredibly manual and repetitive. The goal, he said, is to move away from that and toward a more autonomous workflow, where humans work on high-level conceptual work while agent systems take care of all the clerical work in the background.

One particularly attractive feature of Iris is that it is designed to process a lot of data on the device, giving it greater power Privacy protection Another application that relies heavily on the cloud. Lai says the system is still a hybrid architecture, meaning that larger, more complex tasks are ultimately handled through the cloud, although the company He promises Cloud processing “occurs only when explicitly authorized by the user and uses end-to-end encryption.”

Part of Iris’s expansion strategy was to gain credibility by associating with prominent figures and organizations. Support from Ng – particularly one of the founders of Genesis Google Brain deep learning research team – It helped. Lai was able to arrange a meeting with Ng through a common connection: both are Carnegie Mellon graduates. Lai and his co-founder pitched Iris during that meeting, and ING AI Fund eventually led the startup’s seed round. Nvidia and Google have also backed the company.

IrisGo recently launched beta versions of its macOS and Windows apps, and the company is also currently seeking deals with laptop companies to pre-install the app on new devices. Recently Make such a deal With Acer, Lai said the hope is that the company will be able to strike similar deals with other device manufacturers soon.