Longtime Seattle engineering leaders raise $4.3M for new business automation AI startup Logic

A pair of veteran Seattle engineers raised $4.3 million for Logic, a new startup that aims to help companies integrate AI into their workflows by leveraging existing internal knowledge and business documents.

Steve Krenzel and Jess Garms have more than four decades of combined tech industry experience, leading engineering teams at companies such as Brex, Lyft, Salesforce, Twitter, and Convoy.

Earlier this year they founded Logic, which is working with initial customers across various industries such as e-commerce and logistics.

“Our goal is to make reliable AI-powered business automations easy for anyone to create,” Krenzel said.

The company’s investors include Founders’ Co-op; Ali Partovi’s Neo; current and former Brex execs; Convoy co-founder Dan Lewis; and others.

“We all know that LLMs are powerful, but making them useful for more than just information retrieval or content generation in the enterprise has remained a challenge,” said Aviel Ginzburg, general partner at Founders’ Co-op.

Companies can upload documents that define business requirements and processes into Logic. For example, a retailer may provide its inventory management protocols, such as how to standardize product descriptions or screen prohibited items. Or an insurance company might have rules around how claims are processed.

Logic analyzes those documents and creates APIs powered by large language models. Companies can then use those APIs to automatically implement protocols described in the documents.

The idea is to help companies automate internal processes by replacing thousands of lines of code with LLM-powered systems that don’t require vast engineering resources and can be controlled with natural language.

“It’s documents to APIs in seconds,” Krenzel said.

Logic also allows anyone to edit and tweak those documents — not just engineers.

“Whoever is the domain expert should be able to modify that document,” Krenzel said. “We have all sorts of mechanisms to allow them to do that with confidence.”

Krenzel said Logic wants to be “the repository of all of your business logic.”

There are various LLM-powered tools being released by tech giants and smaller startups that aim to automate business processes. Krenzel pointed to Salesforce’s Einstein products or Writer.com as examples.

He said the company is avoiding “multi-step agentic workflows” and instead focusing on use cases that involve easily repeatable business actions.

“We’ve found that in a lot of cases, agents demo really well, but if you need them to do something reliably a million times without a human in the loop, the technology is just not there yet,” he said.

Krenzel said the company raised its funding round in less than a week.

“It’s rare to find such a combination of a huge market, powerful tailwinds, and the right founding team,” said Ginzburg of Founders’ Co-op.

Krenzel previously co-founded online collaboration startup Thinkfuse, which was acquired by Salesforce in 2012. That’s when he met Garms, who was leading the Seattle office for Salesforce at the time.

The two became fast friends. They later worked together at Twitter’s Seattle office, and Garms officiated Krenzel’s wedding.

Krenzel co-founded a podcasting startup called Banter, and then was a principal software engineer at Convoy. In 2020 he joined Brex, where he most recently led LLM-related efforts.

Garms previously led Lyft’s Seattle-based engineering office, and spent time at Flex Gym Share, Biocogniv, and Two Boxes before teaming up with Krenzel to launch Logic.

The startup, which has four employees, recently moved into a new office in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood. It initially started working out of the office three days per week.

“Within two weeks, we all just started coming in every day,” Krenzel said. “We all really like working with each other. It’s really nice to be back doing a startup with a small group of highly competent people that you just work with really, really well and you enjoy your time with them so much that you choose to spend every day with them. It’s a very cool feeling.”