Bridge SAFE closed in one week for Apollo-1, AUI’s neuro-symbolic conversational AI foundation model.
NEW YORK, Nov. 3, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — AUI (Augmented Intelligence Inc.), the company behind Apollo-1, the world’s first neuro-symbolic foundation model for task-oriented conversational AI, has raised $20 million at a $750 million valuation cap, bringing total funding to nearly $60 million to date.
The round included participation from eGateway Ventures, existing shareholders, an investor group from New Era Capital Partners, and strategic partners. In September 2024, AUI disclosed $10 million at a $350 million valuation cap. At that time, the company announced a strategic go-to-market partnership with Google.
Developed over eight years by founders Ohad Elhelo and Ori Cohen, Apollo-1 introduces a new computational architecture that fuses neural and symbolic reasoning to guarantee deterministic, policy-compliant, and fluent task execution, addressing what many describe as the “missing half of conversational AI.“
While open-ended dialogue powered by large language models (LLMs) has dominated recent years, task-oriented conversations that lead to real-world actions such as bookings, payments, cancellations, and registrations remain largely unsolved.
“There’s a reason everyone knows the names ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini,” said Ohad Elhelo, co-founder and CEO of AUI. “But there’s still almost no example of a major enterprise successfully deploying reliable conversational agents at scale. LLM-based agents work well in open dialogue, but they’re not reliable enough for serious task-oriented deployments.”
Unlike conventional deep-learning approaches that depend on extensive pre-training to approximate behavior, neuro-symbolic foundation models like Apollo-1 encode procedural knowledge directly while using neural modules for perception, language understanding, and generation.
“LLM-based open-ended dialogue represents the B2C framework of conversational AI, while neuro-symbolic task-oriented dialogue ushers in the B2B era, where reliability, determinism, and policy adherence matter as much as fluency,” said Gideon Argov, a Managing Partner of New Era Capital, one of the company’s earliest backers.
Apollo-1 is designed not to function as an agent itself, but to enable any organization to build its own domain-specific, policy-adhering conversational agents.
“I have seen some of today’s top AI leaders walk away with their heads spinning after interacting with Apollo-1,” said Chris Varelas, co-founder of private-equity firm Redwood Capital, an early investor in AUI and advisor to the CEO. “This was a small bridge financing that came together in under a week, ahead of major announcements planned for later this year.”
Apollo-1 is already deployed within Fortune 500 organizations. General availability will be announced separately following current enterprise deployments. The company was founded in 2017, employs 45 people, and counts among its early backers Vertex Pharmaceuticals founder Joshua Boger, UKG Chairman Aron Ain, and former IBM President Jim Whitehurst.
About AUI (Augmented Intelligence Inc.)
AUI builds neuro-symbolic foundation models for task-oriented conversational AI. Apollo-1 enables developers and enterprises to design policy-adhering agents that execute complex procedures with reliability, transparency, and control.
AUI is hiring for a number of positions that can be found at AUI.io.
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