Introducing Genera: Closing the AI Deployment Gap

We’ve raised $10m led by First Round Capital to close the deployment gap for enterprise AI. Are you a fast-growing AI application company looking for an alternative to legacy system integrators? Talk to us. Want to join us in building the future of enterprise software deployments? Check out our careers page.

Deployment is the #1 bottleneck for enterprise AI.

AI has a major capacity shortage. No, we aren’t talking about compute capacity. We are talking about deployment capacity: the hard and necessary work of getting AI applications set up properly for enterprise customers.

Forward Deployed Engineer (FDE) job postings are up over 700% in the last year alone. OpenAI and Anthropic have launched joint ventures aimed at deploying their models through custom-built AI solutions. Demand for deployment capacity is at an all time high, and the stakes are even higher. Massive software markets are up for grabs for the first time in decades. Conversely, the price of failed deployments is paid up front when customers are buying outcomes instead of seats.

While it’s tempting to say everything is different in the AI era, these deployment challenges rhyme with past technology cycles. With the rise of cloud software, system integrators grew into a $450b market for human labor that deploys enterprise software. The solution these legacy SI’s offer, however, is fundamentally at odds with the promise of AI: paying consultants by the hour to deploy software designed to displace human labor. This is why we are building Genera.

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Genera is an AI deployment company for the new generation of AI leaders.

If you are a software company feeling this capacity crunch, you are probably rationing your scarce deployment talent by putting your best people on the most strategic customers. Sooner or later, you will need to hand everyone else off to implementation partners who bill by the hour for mediocre results.

Genera is the best alternative to scaling your FDE team linearly as you grow the customer base. We act as an extension of your in-house team, and are fundamentally different from the legacy system integrator model in two key ways:

First, the work gets done by a combination of agents and humans. Our agents handle the routine parts of a deployment (digging through documentation, running migrations, building custom configurations, writing test cases) so our people can focus on the innately human parts of deploying new technology. Our agents interact with you in Slack and existing project management systems just like a hyper-responsive teammate would.

Second, that technology-first model supports pricing that is much better aligned with our customers' incentives. Instead of billing you by the hour, you only pay when we deliver outcomes that hit your quality bar. Outcomes we deliver range from completing a migration off a legacy system to running an end-to-end deployment of a new add-on AI product.

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Fin and Ironclad are using Genera to run every deployment like it’s their most critical customer.

Fin, one of the key players in the AI customer support category, doubled down on deployment as a competitive advantage in the AI era. With outcome-based pricing, deployments are more directly tied to revenue growth than ever before. They came to Genera to scale the unscalable: high touch deployment experiences that they knew delivered higher resolution rates, but that they couldn’t justify bringing to every customer. This included things like doing detailed analysis of the help center context that powers Fin to find ways to improve it, and offering lightning fast migrations off of legacy help desk systems.

As Junan Pang, VP Customer Success & Solutions put it: “At Fin we live or die based on the quality and the volume of outcomes that we can drive. “With Genera, we are bringing white glove service to every single one of our customers.”

Ironclad, a leader in legal tech, launched their Jurist AI product and needed a way to keep up with demand for deployment capacity. President Jeremy Smith saw the opportunity to transform not just post-sale deployments, but the entire customer journey. In his experience: “In the AI world, customers expect production-quality deployments before the deal closes. We rely on Genera to hit our revenue targets by scaling high quality trials to the entire customer base.”

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We raised $10m to close the gap between the promise of enterprise AI applications and the reality of deploying them.

We are thrilled to announce that we’ve raised $10m led by First Round Capital with participation from BoxGroup, WndrCo, Carpenter Capital, and SuccessVP. We are building out a team of world-class deployment talent, as well as the engineering team to accelerate and scale the outcomes they deliver. Check out our open roles.

Genera has already helped customers deliver successful deployments to Fortune 500 companies, leading AI labs, and household brand names. Want to join the new generation of AI leaders who are reinventing their deployment experience with Genera? Let’s talk.