This startup thinks email could be the key to usable AI agents

AI companies are pushing agents arsenic the adjacent Great Workplace Disruptor, but experts accidental they’re still not acceptable for primetime. They often conflict with autonomous decision-making, can’t cooperate with different agents, fail astatine confidentiality awareness, and integrate poorly into existing systems. 

Industry pioneers similar Andrej Karpathy and Ali Ghodsi person said that, similar the deployment of autonomous vehicles, humans request to beryllium successful the loop successful bid for agents to succeed. 

Startup Mixus understands that and has built an AI cause level that not lone keeps humans successful the workflow, but besides allows those humans to interact with agents straight from their email oregon Slack. 

“We’re gathering customers wherever they are today,” Elliot Katz, Mixus co-founder, told techCrunch. “Where is each idiosyncratic successful the workforce today? For the astir part, they’re connected email. And truthful due to the fact that we tin bash this done email, we judge that’s a mode we tin democratize entree [to agents].”

Mixus lone beta-launched retired of Stanford successful precocious 2024, but it has already raised $2.3 cardinal successful pre-seed backing and brought connected immoderate customers, including covering store concatenation Rainbow Shops, and others crossed concern and tech. 

Ease of usage is Mixus’s biggest selling point, from however it helps make agents to however users tin interact with them. Users tin make an cause oregon aggregate agents from elemental substance prompts. For idiosyncratic successful sales, that punctual mightiness look like: 

“Create an cause that finds each unfastened tasks successful Jira successful task mixus-dummy, and nonstop maine a study with accusation connected each tasks that are overdue. Draft emails to each the assignees who person overdue tasks, and person maine reappraisal them successful the chat and with elemental wide formatting for email (no attachments/docs). Once I verify, nonstop the emails. Run it now. And moving forward, tally it each Monday astatine 7am PST.”

If Mixus works reliably, this is simply a immense unlock for the AI cause space. Most agentic AI tools contiguous either springiness you a pre-built assistant, a la ChatGPT oregon Gemini, oregon necessitate developers to physique customized against utilizing frameworks similar LangChain, AutoGen, oregon crewAI. 

With Mixus, users tin acceptable up their agents wrong Mixus’s level via a chat relation – done written oregon vocal prompts – oregon by simply emailing instructions to agent@mixus.com. Then Mixus volition build, run, and negociate single- oregon multi-step agents straight from the inbox. 

“Most of the world, astir of America, doesn’t adjacent cognize what an AI cause is oregon wherefore it’s adjuvant for them, and they’ve decidedly ne'er utilized one,” Katz said, noting that older workers mightiness person an particularly hard clip learning however to usage agents. “We’re trying to scope each these radical that person ne'er utilized [agents], but could precise overmuch payment from an AI.”

Image Credits:Mixus

Katz and his co-founder Shai Magzimof demoed the exertion for me, showing however casual it is to adhd quality verifiers for your agents by simply instructing astatine which measurement they should travel to you for oversight. For example, they ran an cause to bash probe connected TechCrunch reporters earlier pitching them. The cause would place and stitchery the latest exertion quality and trends, analyse the accusation to place imaginable communicative angles for a TechCrunch reporter, and compile a probe study summarizing the findings. At the past stage, the cause was directed to nonstop the accusation to Katz for verification. Once approved, the cause would nonstop the completed probe study to his Magzimof. 

The founders stressed that humans tin beryllium successful the loop arsenic overmuch oregon arsenic small arsenic a concern oregon endeavor dictates – Magzimof said organizations tin acceptable up company-wide rules, similar ensuring an email gets checked by a quality if it’s being sent externally. Mixus doesn’t ever necessitate quality oversight. So, for example, if an cause has already tally a Jira integration hundreds of times and hasn’t messed it up yet, a quality whitethorn spot it to proceed that task autonomously. 

Or arsenic Katz enactment it: “We alteration workfellow oversight. We don’t mandate workfellow oversight.”

Bringing different colleagues into the workflow is arsenic casual arsenic tagging them successful the chat with an cause oregon adjacent copying them connected the email to the agent. That’s different standout compared to agents connected the markets today. Most models are single-user, and portion Notion AI and Slack GPT let users to collaborate successful shared spaces, they don’t instrumentality it that measurement further of letting the AI negociate conversations and tasks betwixt teammates successful existent time. 

Another halfway diagnostic of Mixus is its quality to store memory. 

“We created Spaces truthful that each team, each person, each radical of radical tin person a shared memory,” Magzimof said. “Then each my agents, each my files, each the radical tin beryllium successful that precise circumstantial Space’s memory.”

While ChatGPT and Claude some enactment memory, their endeavor plans don’t yet enactment shared cause representation crossed users.  

What other tin Mixus do?

A moving database of Mixus’s capabilities arsenic an AI agent. Image Credits:Mixus

The founders ran maine done astir an hour-long demo showing a scope of usage cases and abilities. Its agents bash look miraculous, reflecting a precocious grade of autonomy and representation that enactment Mixus connected the precocious extremity of the AI cause spectrum. That is, if the merchandise works arsenic reliably arsenic it did successful the demo.

Like different agents, Mixus tin integrate with different tools, from Gmail to Jira, and users tin trigger agents to tally instantly oregon connected a schedule. 

Agents successful Mixus tin tally and edit documents oregon spreadsheets inline, which is akin to ChatGPT, Microsoft Copilot, and Google Gemini, but those are often constricted to sandboxed environments. Mixus besides enables agents to autonomously navigate organizational discourse – similar figuring retired who successful an enactment owns a peculiar task by looking done Jira tickets. That benignant of cross-tool, org-aware reasoning is inactive uncommon among today’s cause platforms. 

Built connected a operation of Anthropic’s Claude 4 and OpenAI’s o3, Mixus agents besides person entree to the web, which Magzimof says tin beryllium utilized for tasks similar unrecorded probe oregon monitoring. He described it arsenic “Google Alerts connected steroids.” 

Taken together, Mixus appears to beryllium little of a productivity instrumentality and much similar a tireless integer workfellow – 1 of the astir ambitious attempts yet to reimagine AI arsenic a existent collaborator. If it works arsenic advertised, your adjacent “coworker” mightiness not beryllium human, but it mightiness get done your inbox faster than you do.

Got a delicate extremity oregon confidential documents? We’re reporting connected the interior workings of the AI manufacture — from the companies shaping its aboriginal to the radical impacted by their decisions. Reach retired to Rebecca Bellan at rebecca.bellan@techcrunch.com and Maxwell Zeff at maxwell.zeff@techcrunch.com. For unafraid communication, you tin interaction america via Signal at @rebeccabellan.491 and @mzeff.88.