AUI Raises $20M, Betting on Neuro-Symbolic AI Over Transformers

Augmented Intelligence Inc. (AUI) has just closed a $20 million bridge SAFE round at a $750 million valuation cap, bringing its total funding to nearly $60 million. The fundraising, completed in less than a week, is part of a broader strategy to accelerate the commercial rollout of Apollo‑1, AUI’s neuro‑symbolic foundation model designed for task‑oriented dialogue.

Apollo‑1 departs from the pure transformer architecture that dominates the LLM landscape. The model’s core innovation is a two‑layer hybrid: a neural module, powered by large language models, handles linguistic perception and natural‑language response generation; a symbolic reasoning engine, built over several years, interprets structured task elements such as intents, entities, and parameters. This separation allows the system to maintain state continuity, enforce organizational policies, and trigger tool or API calls deterministically—capabilities that are difficult to achieve with transformer‑only agents.

The startup’s CEO, Ohad Elhelo, highlights how this architecture emerged from a massive data‑collection effort: millions of human‑agent interactions across 60,000 live agents were recorded, enabling the team to abstract a symbolic language that defines the structure of task‑based dialogs. Apollo‑1 is engineered to be plug‑and‑play for enterprises—deploying like any modern foundation model, compatible with standard cloud and hybrid environments, and cost‑efficient compared to frontier reasoning models. Its symbolic layer encodes procedural rules, ensuring deterministic execution for sensitive or regulated tasks—such as blocking a Basic Economy flight cancellation—without relying on probabilistic inference.

Apollo‑1 is already in closed beta with Fortune 500 companies and is slated for general availability before the end of 2025. Developers can access the model via a playground that allows joint configuration of policies, rules, and behaviors, or through an OpenAI‑compatible API. By offering enterprise‑grade policy enforcement, rule‑based customization, and steering guardrails, AUI positions itself as the go‑to solution for organizations where reliability trumps the conversational fluency of today’s LLMs.