Apple and Andreessen Horowitz alums raise $20 million to bring AI to ‘real economy’ businesses
· Fortune
AI is swiftly rewiring the way people work, but an outsize amount of this workplace revolution has so far been confined to Fortune 500-style companies. Ciridae has raised $20 million in seed funding on the promise of bringing AI to the many U.S. businesses that don’t hold quarterly earnings calls.
The funding round was led by Accel, with participation from Andreessen Horowitz and General Catalyst. Its co-founders, former a16z partner Jack Soslow and former Apple and Tenyx machine learning lead Jack Weissenberger, see AI adoption as an existential issue for the mid-market companies their startup is focused on servicing.
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“Many of the businesses most exposed to AI risk [are] least equipped to do this rearchitecture themselves. These are businesses in home services, construction, industrial distribution—the businesses that compose our real economy—and if they don’t do it, they will be out-competed and atrophy over time,” Soslow told Fortune in an interview.
Ciridae’s business is part of a larger trend where firms are looking to AI to streamline and improve existing businesses. The investment and holding firm Long Lake, for instance, just purchased a corporate travel platform for $6.3 billion in hopes of using AI to modernize the business. Capitalizing on the investor interest in these kinds of AI-led transformations, Ciridae will initially focus its services on companies backed by private equity.
A lot of Ciridae’s work with real economy businesses so far involves disentangling back office headaches or working around more localized concerns like scheduling around workplace rivalries. And the startup has been finding traction: Soslow said Ciridae works with more than 20 partners and had “high seven-figures” of revenue in 2025.
While the co-founders acknowledged a “culture problem” around how many Americans—and likely employees at the businesses they plan to work with—view AI, they argued that Ciridae successfully offering its service to businesses will help alleviate those misgivings.
“We’re not building AI that’s actually mowing the lawns. We’re just helping enable them to mow more lawns at a more regular cadence,” Weissenberger said. “What the end consumer is seeing is just, ‘Hey, my lawn care service is way better.’”
Ciridae worked with one Dallas-based commercial construction company, replacing its CRM, project management, and working capital tools with an AI operating system. In so doing, the construction company cut the time it took to complete its “close,” or monthly accounting processes, from two weeks to a single click, Weissenberger said.
At a time when so much attention remains glued to large tech firms either being disrupted or buoyed by AI, Ciridae stands out for its focus on “unsexy” companies, Accel partner Christine Esserman said in an interview with Fortune.
“Everybody’s trying to focus on this top enterprise segment,” Esserman said. “And a lot of people are ignoring the $200 million top-line restoration business in Texas that actually wants to use AI but has no idea how to do it.”
This story was originally featured on Fortune.com