Reflex, a startup that uses artificial intelligence agents to build and maintain custom business software for enterprises, said it has raised a $14 million Series A funding round. Standard Capital led the round, with participation from Databricks Ventures, Y Combinator, Lux Capital and Abstract Ventures. The company has now raised $19 million in total.
Reflex is targeting a long-standing inefficiency in enterprise software: most businesses rely on generic third-party platforms that include features they never use while lacking niche capabilities they need. Companies typically work around this by buying overlapping subscriptions and patching gaps with manual spreadsheets and repetitive workflows, since building bespoke, mission-critical software in-house requires specialized engineers that only the largest companies can afford. Reflex pairs AI-assisted development with a “software factory” workflow to help smaller companies identify, assemble, deploy and maintain applications tailored to their own operational processes.
Because customers own the applications they build with Reflex, they can avoid lock-in to an expensive third-party ecosystem, the company said. Teams can describe a needed capability in natural language and iterate on the design until it fits. Reflex’s software can run in the public cloud, in on-premises data centers or in highly secure air-gapped environments, an advantage for enterprises in regulated industries such as financial services, healthcare and government.
Reflex is led by co-founder and Chief Executive Nikhil Rao, formerly one of the first engineers at autonomous driving startup Drive.ai, who joined Apple’s Special Projects Group after Apple acquired that company. Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer Alek Petuskey previously worked as a machine learning engineer at Ancestry.com and as a researcher at NASA. The two originally developed Reflex as an open-source Python framework and built a company around it after it gained popularity, accumulating almost 30,000 GitHub stars and 400,000 monthly downloads within months. Reflex has been used to build more than a million deployed applications globally, with users including Amazon.com, Walmart, The World Bank and Dell Technologies.
Dell used the platform to design and build a dedicated server monitoring system now used by more than 6,000 of its staff, and an unnamed aerospace company used Reflex to replace its legacy manufacturing resource planning platform. Reflex said its revenue has grown more than tenfold in the past year. Standard Capital’s Dalton Caldwell said the popularity of AI coding has led many companies to realize there is an alternative to buying traditional software-as-a-service applications, adding that most companies still run on software built for someone else’s business.
Reflex said it plans to expand its engineering and sales operations teams to support demand in the traditional corporate and government sectors. It is also putting the final touches on a new product called Workflows, which will use AI agents to automate multistep business operations.
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