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Salt AI, an AI workflow orchestration firm for enterprises, raised $3 million in seed funding and appointed Aber Whitcomb as CEO.
Salt AI offers a unified AI collaboration environment, dubbed Salt, where organizations can securely connect their firewalled data to build AI automations, agentic workflows and bespoke AI solutions. With a
visual drag and drop interface, and full-code capabilities, every member of an organization can collaborate in real time to build powerful AI on the Salt platform. Teams can deploy in one click to Salt’s cloud infrastructure that autoscales to meet the real-time needs of any use case.
“We’re at an inflection point where AI can transform how companies operate, but only if we make it truly accessible and actionable,” said Whitcomb in a statement. “Salt’s platform enables teams to create powerful AI agents and workflows that automate complex tasks and drive real business impact. I’m excited to lead Salt as we help organizations build and scale their AI capabilities.”
The investment will accelerate development of Salt’s proprietary AI orchestration platform and expand its market presence.
“We’re pleased to back the Salt AI team. Aber Whitcomb’s impressive track record of success in launching and scaling businesses, paired with the immense market opportunity makes this an exciting investment for us.” said Kristian Blaszczynski, partner at Morpheus, in a statement. “Very soon, AI will power almost every industry and Salt will be the engine on which enterprises execute.”
Salt integrates with all major closed-source and open-source LLMs and supports diffusion models for generative art. Users can connect to 30+ enterprise data sources for both reading and writing, with new connections being released weekly.
Whitcomb and Jim Benedetto started Salt in Los Angeles in 2023.
The company now has 16 people. Whitcomb pivoted into this business from PlaiDay, the generative AI social mobile app that first targeted consumers. Chris DeWolfe, who was the previous CEO, stayed with the Web3 gaming part of the company and renamed it Rough House Games. Benedetto, Whitcomb and Charlie Basil went with Salt.
“We built the Salt platform as the backend to enable rapid feature development for PlaiDay, and ultimately realized we had solved all the major pain points for developing and deploying AI, and that taking our backend to market as a B2B SaaS solution was a better and bigger opportunity than the consumer app,” said Whitcomb in an email to VentureBeat.
Asked about the competition, he said the space is very noisy, with a lot of tools using similar language to describe their feature set.
“It does feel crowded at first blush,” Whitcomb said. “However, there are only a small number of significant competitors. Salt differentiates itself by enabling team collaboration on AI workflows. It does this by providing a robust and powerful visual-first toolkit that enables non-technical stakeholders (executives, product managers, designers, marketers, etc) to build AI; alongside a full-code toolkit that enables engineers to get down to the bare metal and have complete control over their solutions. Salt is the only platform that has fully featured solutions for both user types.”
