A startup called Ardent AI Labs Inc. says data engineering is the next major discipline in line for “agentic” automation after getting $2.15 million in a pre-seed funding round.

The money comes from Crane Venture Partners, Active Capital and angel investors that include Zach Wilson.

Although the amount of capital raised is quite tiny compared with some AI startups, Ardent AI is building something that may soon become much more valuable: “the world’s first AI data engineer.”

The startup says its data engineer is an intelligent AI agent that can work autonomously on complex data engineering tasks. Its main purpose is to create, manage and repair data pipelines that span cloud and on-premises infrastructures. Like all AI agents, it’s designed to perform its work alone, with minimal oversight from humans.

Ardent AI believes that an agentic data engineer can be useful in a world where data-hungry AI is at the center of almost everything related to enterprise computer systems today. As companies race to adopt AI, they need access to more data than ever, and that has caused a lot of strain on their underlying infrastructure systems. In particular, the task of creating and maintaining scalable data pipelines has put human engineers under immense strain, and they can barely keep up. They’re not helped by the fact that they’re still reliant on brittle and cumbersome data orchestration tools, manually coded scripts and other ad hoc processes.

The startup’s solution is simple and elegant: It has created an agentic data engineer that it says is every bit as skillful as experienced human data engineers. It’s designed to help them keep up with surging data volumes by automatically maintaining and repairing any pipelines that need attention. The data engineering agent integrates with existing systems, so it can automatically model new data pipelines before they’re built and debug existing ones.

Founder Vikram Chennai tells a classic rags-to-riches story. He explained that he arrived in San Francisco exactly one year ago on a one-way ticket, without any contacts in the city. All he had was a laptop and an idea, but that was all he needed.

“Most of my time at a previous startup was spent firefighting broken data pipelines,” Chennai related. “I realized that the tooling wasn’t broken, but rather the entire approach was. So I built an agent to handle it.”

Chennai said he spent several months moving around the city, making friends and sleeping on couches as he tried to “sell” his data engineering agent concept. It took a while, and he was rejected seven times by investors he approached, but his persistence eventually paid off, and he finally secured the backing he needs. “It wasn’t easy, but I knew we were solving something real,” he added.

Since launching earlier this year, Ardent AI says, it has already become profitable, with more than $100,000 in annual recurring review and growing at a rate of 70% per month. With Ardent AI, companies can complete complex data engineering tasks that once took days in a matter of minutes, Chennai said.

At present, Ardent’s AI is focused on automatic data pipeline maintenance, data modeling and debugging. In the coming weeks it will launch sandboxed testing environments that allow its agents to test changes they make to data pipelines fully before they’re deployed.

Crane Venture Partners’ Aneel Lakhani said he was impressed by Chennai, because his company’s approach is different, pragmatic and technically sound, focused on real-world engineering problems. “Vikram is the kind of founder who ships fast, listens to users and has the raw determination to build a generational company,” he said.

Ardent AI’s platform already has native integrations with common data platforms such as Databricks, Snowflake and Airflow, and one of its immediate tasks will be to expand on this and support additional platforms. Going forward, Chennai also wants to expand the company’s engineering team and launch a new and improved version of its data engineering agent with enhanced autonomous capabilities.

Image: SiliconANGLE/Dreamina AI