{"id":451991,"date":"2026-05-20T23:29:16","date_gmt":"2026-05-20T23:29:16","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/451991\/"},"modified":"2026-05-20T23:29:16","modified_gmt":"2026-05-20T23:29:16","slug":"irisgo-a-startup-backed-by-andrew-ng-looks-to-become-the-ai-desktop-buddy-you-never-knew-you-needed","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/451991\/","title":{"rendered":"IrisGo, a startup backed by Andrew Ng, looks to become the AI desktop buddy you never knew you needed"},"content":{"rendered":"

Industry insiders say the next big thing in AI is \u201cproactive\u201d systems<\/a>: agents that can anticipate a user\u2019s needs \u2014 and fulfill them \u2014\u00a0before the user even knows what those needs are.<\/p>\n

One startup that\u2019s looking to make headway in this area is IrisGo. The company, which closed a $2.8 million seed round<\/a> led by Andrew Ng\u2019s AI Fund earlier this year, is building a desktop companion for PCs that can learn about a user\u2019s daily workflows and then automate them with limited to no human prompting.<\/p>\n

IrisGo was co-founded by Jeffrey Lai, a former Apple engineer who helped to build the Chinese language version of Siri, the company\u2019s automated assistant. (Somewhat slyly, Iris is Siri spelled backward.)<\/p>\n

The core idea is simple: Show the program how to do something once, and it remembers that process for future automated use \u2014 no repeat instructions needed.<\/p>\n

During a conversation with TechCrunch, Lai ran a demo, showing how his platform could learn to place a coffee order online. As I watched, IrisGo recorded the steps it took to select a latte from Philz Coffee (a popular Bay Area chain), fill out credit card information, and then hit purchase. Lai then asked IrisGo to repeat the order on its own; the agent dutifully complied.<\/p>\n

Buying coffee, of course, is not really the point. Instead, the hope is that the system will automate a whole host of business-related tasks. Iris comes with a built-in \u201cskills\u201d library \u2014 things like email drafting, invoice processing, report building, document summarization, and many other ready-to-use automated workflows. At the same time, Iris learns from the user\u2019s desktop behavior and automatically adds those tasks to its potential list of action items.<\/p>\n

The application also includes a coding assistant \u2014 similar in concept to OpenAI\u2019s Codex or Anthropic\u2019s Claude Code \u2014 designed to assist developers as they go about their work.<\/p>\n

\u201cOur target audience is knowledge workers \u2014 white-collar companies. There\u2019s a lot of repetitive tasks that those workers do every day,\u201d Lai said, noting that, despite the high-octane power of today\u2019s frontier models, AI-assisted office work can still feel incredibly manual and repetitive. The goal, he said, 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.<\/p>\n

A particularly appealing feature of IrisGo is that it is designed to process a lot of data on-device, giving it stronger privacy protections<\/a> than other applications that rely heavily on the cloud. Lai says that the system is still a hybrid architecture \u2014\u00a0meaning that larger, more complex tasks are ultimately processed through the cloud, although the company promises that<\/a> cloud processing \u201conly occurs when explicitly authorized by the user and uses\u00a0end-to-end encryption.\u201d<\/p>\n

Part of the strategy for scaling Iris has been to garner credibility through association with prominent figures and organizations. Support from Ng \u2014 notably a co-founder of the formative deep learning research team Google Brain<\/a> \u2014 has helped. Lai managed to set up a meeting with Ng through a shared connection: Both are alumni from Carnegie Mellon University. Lai and his co-founder demoed Iris during that meeting, and Ng\u2019s AI Fund ultimately led the startup\u2019s seed round. Nvidia and Google have also backed the company.<\/p>\n

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<\/a> with Acer, and Lai said the hope is that the company can strike similar deals with other device makers soon.<\/p>\n

When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Industry insiders say the next big thing in AI is \u201cproactive\u201d systems: agents that can anticipate a user\u2019s…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":451992,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[345,80282,343,344,40706,85,211188,46,125],"class_list":["post-451991","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-artificial-intelligence","tag-ai","tag-andrew-ng","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-artificialintelligence","tag-google-brain","tag-il","tag-irisgo","tag-israel","tag-technology"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451991","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=451991"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/451991\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/451992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=451991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=451991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/il\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=451991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}