Meet the founders of Relevance AI: Daniel Vassilev, Jacky Koh, and Daniel Palmer

The next wave of business transformation will be driven by AI agents — and the upstarts and SaaS giants who embrace them early will reimagine labor, productivity, and human creativity. We believe every company, in every industry, will ultimately deploy AI agents as a core part of their workforce. Relevance AI, the platform where anyone can build and recruit teams of AI agents, is leading this shift.

We sat down with the founders of Relevance AI, co-CEO Daniel Vassilev, co-CEO Jacky Koh, and co-founder Daniel Palmer, where they shared their vision of the AI horizon.

At Bessemer, Caty Rea, Libbie Frost, and Jeremy Levine are leading Relevance AI’s $24 million Series B. We saw how this team, with ambition and technical clarity, aims to democratize access to agentic AI. The company’s latest customer growth is a testament to both the surging market demand for its platform and the effectiveness of its innovative approach.

Q&A with the founders of Relevance AI

What inspired you to start Relevance AI?

We realized that while AI had the potential to transform businesses, existing solutions were often inflexible or required deep technical expertise. We founded Relevance AI to address these critical gaps and allow businesses to build custom AI agents tailored to their specific needs.

Today, Relevance AI’s agentic solutions are increasing productivity for thousands of subject-matter experts at fast-growing scaleups to Fortune 500 companies, including Qualified, Activision, and SafetyCulture. Relevance AI has seen a 40x increase in agents created YoY. 40,000 agents were created using Relevance AI in January 2025 alone.

What exactly does Relevance AI do?

Relevance AI is the home of the AI workforce – where anyone can build and recruit teams of AI agents to complete tasks on autopilot.

Our mission is to help teams hire their first AI employee and build their workforce. For example, SafetyCulture, a workplace operations platform with over 75,000 customers in over 180 countries, is helping teams drive daily improvements across their organizations. Since January 2024, SafetyCulture has been working with Relevance AI to onboard their first AI workforce.

The results? A happier team that can focus on more high value tasks and is no longer bogged down with admin. We believe that by the end of 2025, almost every company will have a team of AI employees, which will enable human teams to be limited by only their ideas, not their size.

Why do you believe onboarding AI agents is an urgent necessity now?

We’re already seeing CEOs of leading technology companies, including Shopify, Box, Duolingo, and many more, state their AI-first strategies and mandates for the future of their companies. Global labor and productivity is being reimagined by AI, and agentic workforces will be new sources of productivity, innovation, and economic growth. Most importantly, agentic workforces will empower human employees to achieve more than ever possible.

In the last couple of years, we’ve seen AI surpass and achieve milestones that we once thought were decades away. According to Stanford’s 2025 AI Index Report, in 2024, 78% of organizations reported using AI, up sharply from 55% the previous year, reflecting a significant increase in adoption across sectors.

It’s safe to say, companies that fail to adopt AI solutions will be at a massive competitive disadvantage.

What’s something CEOs could do today to help their teams upskill with AI and prepare for agentic workforces?

CEOs can put AI agents directly in the hands of domain experts rather than limiting them to technical teams. Since our last funding round, we've consistently found that when subject-matter experts are empowered to build and train AI agents themselves, the results are transformative.

Too often, companies make the mistake of treating AI as just another software tool that gets handed down from IT, resulting in generic agents that don't understand the nuances of your specific business or silo-d vertical agents. Instead, CEOs should foster a mindset shift where an agentic automation platform isn’t viewed as another piece of the tech stack, but rather a platform to augment every team’s output.

This approach enables your people to train highly specialized agents that understand the intricacies of your specific business processes and industry terminology, bringing truly human-quality work to previously unautomatable tasks. Start by identifying repetitive workflows that consume valuable time from your most creative people, and empower those same experts to automate these processes.

The companies that will thrive in this new paradigm are those that reimagine their operations with AI agents as first-class team members, not just tools. This isn't just about efficiency — it's about unleashing your team's potential.

What’s next for Relevance AI?

We’re doing nothing short of transforming how organizations worldwide think about their workforce. With our recent $24 million Series B funding, we're accelerating our mission to empower a million knowledge workers to create specialized AI workforces that deliver human-quality work tailored to each company's unique needs.

We've just launched two groundbreaking features that represent the future of work: 'Workforce,' our visual multi-agent system builder, and 'Invent,' the world's first text-to-agent generator. Together, these innovations enable domain experts — not just engineers — to create and deploy teams of specialized AI agents that integrate seamlessly with existing tech stacks.

The big vision that truly excites us is creating a world where the AI workforce becomes as fundamental to business operations as human employees are today. By the end of 2025, we believe companies without an agent builder platform will find themselves at a significant disadvantage.