Raygun spin-off goes all-in on AI agents
Wellington software performance company Raygun last night launched Autohive, a spinoff business that has built infrastructure allowing small and medium-sized businesses to develop their own AI agents easily.
At a launch party on Wellington’s waterfront, Autohive co-founder John-Daniel Trask said the debut of ChatGPT in November 2022 gave him an “electric sensation that everything was about to change”.
The following year, he directed most of the 25-strong team at Raygun, an 18-year-old business that provides high-performance monitoring tools to teams in over 120 countries, including Domino's, HBO, and Virgin Atlantic, to get hands-on with AI tools.
Autohive’s Zheng Li, Lana Vaughan, Serge van Dam, and John-Daniel Trask at the launch party in Wellington.
“Raygun started scaling its business with AI two years ago, and through that time identified the challenges that even an engineering-heavy business faces when creating them,” said Trask.
“While they [AI agents] are hugely valuable to Raygun, we saw a significant opportunity in making the creation, discovery and execution of AI agents something that every business could leverage, not just IT-centric, enterprise-level organisations.”
Autohive was born, offering a web platform that allows easy creation of AI agents that can perform tasks, and build workflows that uncover valuable insights from business data.
Autohive says the types of use cases for its platform include “transforming raw content into polished social posts, blog articles, and marketing materials in minutes, handling customer inquiries 24/7 with smart response systems, creating personalised follow-ups based on customer history, converting messy spreadsheet data into clear action items, and generating client proposals and reports in minutes instead of days.”
AI agents, which move beyond AI-powered chatbots to automate tasks, are being built into virtually every large tech platform, from Google and Microsoft to SAP and Salesforce. Trask said Autohive gave SMEs greater flexibility to build AI agents without the need for coding skills and integrating with popular platforms like Gmail, Hubspot, Microsoft Teams, Slack and Discord.
“We have built something that puts you at the absolute cutting edge of AI technology,” he said at the Autohive launch, before promising to help everyone in the room build their first AI agent.
“There are capabilities of Autohive that none of the frontier labs are providing today. Your early feedback on Autohive will absolutely shape the way that product works.”
Autohive has a consumption-based pricing model, with the Team plan costing $80 a month, including three million credits and 100GB of storage. A free version allows experimentation with the AI agents.
Autohive's leadership team is made up of Wellington-based CEO, John-Daniel Trask, U.S-based COO Lana Vaughan, and Wellington-based VP of Marketing, Zheng Li. The company currently has a team of 20+ engineers and sales staff, and is hiring a sales-focused AI engineer and a technical AI engineer.
Trasked wrapped up the Autohive launch with a call to use AI to boost productivity and stimulate economic growth.
“New Zealand faces some very real challenges, too, and it's easy to point fingers at the government and wait for someone else to come fix it,” he said.
“But here's the truth: we are the solution. Every business that automates… grows faster. That’s a win for all of New Zealand.”
