For all their potential, AI brokers have been sluggish to make an impression within the enterprise, and one new startup is betting that the rationale they haven’t is a scarcity of context.
Launched as a part of Y Combinator’s 2025 summer time cohort, Trace is a workflow orchestration startup aimed toward filling that hole. The corporate maps advanced company environments and processes in order that brokers have the context they should scale shortly.
“OpenAI and Anthropic are constructing these sensible interns that may be leveraged throughout the firm,” says Hint CEO Tim Cherkasov, referring to the AI labs’ instruments. “We’re constructing the supervisor that is aware of the place to place them.”
On Thursday, the London-based firm mentioned it had raised $3 million in seed funding from Y Combinator, Zeno Ventures, Transpose Platform Administration, Goodwater Capital, Formosa Capital, and WeFunder. Angel buyers Benjamin Bryant and Kevin Moore additionally invested.
Hint’s system begins by constructing a data graph from an organization’s present instruments — methods like e-mail, Slack, and Airtable that form the day-to-day working lifetime of the agency. With that context in place, customers can immediate the system with a high-level process — like “We have to design a brand new microsite” or “Lets develop our 2027 gross sales plan” — and Hint will come again with a step-by-step workflow, delegating some duties to AI brokers and assigning others to human employees. When the system does invoke an AI agent, it’s going to immediate it with the precise information wanted to finish its sub-task.
The concept is to automate away the fragile work of on-boarding AI brokers, one of many greatest blockers for precise deployment inside firms.
With so many firms centered on agentic AI, Hint could have loads of competitors. Earlier this week, Anthropic launched its personal tackle enterprise brokers, centered on pre-built plugins for particular departmental capabilities. And most of the office productiveness providers Hint can be drawing from, like Atlassian’s Jira, are launching their very own brokers, which is able to probably compete with the startup’s system.
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However Hint’s founders imagine their knowledge-graph method would be the key to success, as they’ll construct context engineering deep into the construction of agentic deployment.
“2024 and 2025 was nonetheless about immediate engineering. Now we’ve moved from immediate engineering to context engineering,” says CTO Arthur Romanov. “Whoever gives one of the best context on the proper time goes to be the infrastructure on high of which the AI-first firms can be constructed. And we hope to be that infrastructure.”
