BAY AREA — IrisGo closed a $2.8 million seed round led by Andrew Ng's AI Fund earlier this year. The company 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.

IrisGo was co-founded by Jeffrey Lai, a former Apple engineer who helped build the Chinese language version of Siri. Lai and his co-founder, both Carnegie Mellon University alumni, demoed the product during a meeting with Ng.

The application remembers processes shown to it for future automated use without repeat instructions. During a demo, IrisGo learned to place an online coffee order by recording the steps to select a latte from Philz Coffee, fill out credit card information, and hit purchase. It then repeated the order on its own after the demo user asked it to do so.

"Despite the high-octane power of today's frontier models, AI-assisted office work can still feel incredibly manual and repetitive," Lai said. "Our target audience is knowledge workers — white collar companies. There's a lot of repetitive tasks that those workers do every day."

"The goal is to move away from that and toward a more fully autonomous workflow, where the human works on high-level conceptual work while agentic systems take care of all the clerical work in the background," he said. "Cloud processing only occurs when explicitly authorized by the user and uses end-to-end encryption," Lai added.

The software also learns from the user's desktop behavior and automatically adds observed tasks to its potential list of action items. Its built-in skills library includes email drafting, invoice processing, report building, and document summarization. The application also includes a coding assistant designed to assist developers. IrisGo is designed to process a lot of data on-device to provide stronger privacy protections than other applications that rely heavily on the cloud.

Part of the company's scaling strategy has been support from Ng, Nvidia, and Google. IrisGo recently launched beta versions of its macOS and Windows apps and struck a preinstall deal with Acer. The company is pursuing additional deals with other laptop manufacturers to preinstall its app on new devices.