Industry insiders say the next big thing in artificial intelligence (AI) is “proactive” systems: agents that can anticipate a user’s needs — and fulfill them — before the user even knows what those needs are. One startup looking to make headway in this area is IrisGo, which closed a $2.8 million seed round led by Andrew Ng's AI Fund earlier this year.

IrisGo was co-founded by Jeffrey Lai, a former Apple engineer who helped build the Chinese language version of Siri. The core idea is simple: show the program how to do something once, and it remembers that process for future automated use — no repeat instructions needed. During a conversation with TechCrunch, Lai ran a demo, showing how his platform could learn to place a coffee order online.

The application also includes a coding assistant designed to assist developers as they go about their work, similar in concept to OpenAI's Codex or Anthropic’s Claude Code. According to Lai, the target audience is knowledge workers — white-collar companies. There are a lot of repetitive tasks that those workers do every day, and the goal is to move away from that and toward a more fully autonomous workflow.

A particularly appealing feature of IrisGo is that it is designed to process a lot of data on-device, giving it stronger privacy protections than other applications that rely heavily on the cloud. Part of the strategy for scaling Iris has been to garner credibility through association with prominent figures and organizations. Support from Ng — notably a co-founder of the formative deep learning research team Google Brain — has helped.

IrisGo recently launched the beta versions of its macOS and Windows apps, and the company is also currently pursuing deals with laptop companies to preinstall the app on new devices. It recently struck such a deal with Acer, and Lai said the hope is that the company can strike similar deals with other device makers soon.