Artificial intelligence startup Poetic has raised $50 million in a Series A funding round led by Kleiner Perkins, valuing the company at $500 million as it expands its enterprise automation platform for complex, high-stakes workflows.

Founders Fund, First Harmonic and OpenAI also participated in the financing, the San Francisco-based company said in a press relase.

Poetic is betting that enterprises need more control over AI systems than today’s autonomous “agents” can offer. Rather than allowing AI to make independent judgment calls, the company uses a proprietary programming language that translates operators’ natural-language instructions into deterministic execution designed to improve reliability and reduce costs.

“Right now in AI, there’s too much attention on quick demos and shiny objects, and not enough on outcomes,” said Markie Wagner, Poetic’s founder and CEO. “We built a new kind of software that learns like AI but runs like code, so the hardest work in your business finally gets done reliably.”

The company said its technology is "designed for repetitive, multi-hour processes that run thousands of times each day, require near-perfect accuracy and rely on operational knowledge that is often undocumented." Instead of relying on autonomous agents that can be difficult to supervise, Poetic says its software encodes that expertise into deterministic workflows with minimal token usage.

The platform is already being used by large financial services companies and has generated tens of millions of dollars in savings for Fortune 500 customers by automating tasks including transaction monitoring and dispute investigations, the company said. Among its customers are SoFi Technologies, Chime and American International Group.

Poetic reached an eight-figure annualized revenue run rate in 2025 with a team of just four employees.

At SoFi, Poetic said it achieved 99% quality in end-to-end fraud investigations within five weeks, enabling customers to regain account access immediately rather than waiting days. At AIG, it reported 99% accuracy on a previously labor-intensive operational process.

“In just weeks, Poetic was able to execute many of our fraud processes end-to-end while improving quality metrics and the member experience,” said SoFi Chief Executive Anthony Noto. “As we’ve scaled across the business, we’ve seen 100% process adherence, even in our most complex compliance investigations.”

Leigh Marie Braswell, a partner at Kleiner Perkins who led the investment, said Poetic stood out for its ability to automate complicated enterprise processes with accuracy that can exceed human performance.

“What Poetic has built is genuinely different,” Braswell said. “The fact that they were able to automate at the largest companies with the highest requirements is a reflection of how deeply the product works.”

Founded in 2023 by former Google and Waymo machine-learning engineer Markie Wagner, who previously ran AI consultancy Delphi Labs, Poetic said it plans to use the new capital to expand its forward-deployed teams, enter additional industries with complex operational requirements and broaden adoption among large enterprises.

“The enterprise AI landscape is littered with pilots that never made it to production,” Wagner said. “We’ve had a 100% pilot-to-production conversion rate. We’re not here to run pilots. We’re here to transform businesses.”

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