Sentra Gets $5m to Build 'Thinking Companies'

In San Francisco, a company called Sentra has raised a $5 million seed round for development of software promising to 'transform companies into cognitive organisms.' With its roots in research from MIT, Sentra continuously builds a timeline of a firm's decisions and commitments, and learns its priorities.

Sentra says its 'enterprise general intelligence' approach is radically different from other AI and machine learning innovations, enabling real-time alignment, collaboration and adaptive decision-making across diverse organizations. The system automates workflows such as status reporting, meeting decision capture, actionable reminders, and just-in-time onboarding through modular apps, while 'preserving institutional knowledge by memorializing key decisions and linking the who, what, when, and why behind every choice.' The firm is currently running a paid proof-of-concept exercise with SoftBank, demonstrating the functioning of its organizational memory platform in complex global enterprises.

The round was led by a16Z speedrun and Together Fund, with backers also including Parable, Precursor Ventures, Inovia, Backwards Capital, Antigravity Capital, and a number of angel investors.

The company's founders are Jae Gwan Park (CEO), Andrey Starenky (CTO), Al Rey, and former MIT professor Ashwin Gopinath.

'Modern companies generate more knowledge than they can retain or use,' says Park (pictured). 'Every conversation, decision and document adds to a growing ocean of context that disappears moments later or stays siloed. Sentra proactively creates a living company memory that learns, reasons, and reflects alongside them.' Gopinath adds: 'In Reflexion*, we showed how AI agents could learn by reflecting on their own reasoning. At Sentra, we've applied this principle to organizational memory itself, building systems that don't just store information, but learn what matters based on use, surface the right context at the right time, and evolve as the organization does. This is how we move from static knowledge bases to true Enterprise General Intelligence.'

Web site: www.sentra.app .


* an MIT research paper exploring agent self-improvement through feedback

All articles 2006-23 written and edited by Mel Crowther and/or Nick Thomas, 2024- by Nick Thomas, unless otherwise stated.