Amazon hires Adept's co-founders and licenses its agent technology

A startup built around software agents

Adept was founded in 2022 to build AI agents for software tasks: systems meant to carry out actions in software on a user's behalf, rather than only answering questions.^[1][2] Before the June 2024 announcement, the company had raised over $415 million from backers including NVIDIA, Atlassian, Workday and Greylock, and was valued at about $1 billion after a round in March 2023.^[2]

What was announced

In June 2024 Adept announced that its co-founders and some of its team were joining Amazon's AGI organization.^[1][2] In the same announcement the company said Amazon was licensing its agent technology, its family of multimodal models and several datasets.^[1][3]

Multimodal models are trained to handle more than one kind of input — text and images together, for instance — rather than text alone. A licence is not a purchase: Amazon obtained rights to use the technology and took on people, while Adept continued to exist as a company.

Co-founder and CEO David Luan joined Amazon's AGI team, which was led by senior vice president and chief scientist Rohit Prasad.^[2]

New leadership and a narrower scope

Adept head of engineering Zach Brock took over as CEO, while Tim Weingarten remained head of product.^[1]

Adept said that continuing to build both foundation models and an enterprise agent product would have required spending significant attention on fundraising, so it would refocus entirely on solutions that enable agentic AI.^[1] Foundation models are large models trained on broad data and then adapted to many downstream tasks; building them is expensive, and doing that work alongside a separate enterprise product puts two quite different demands on the same team at once. The announcement presented the change as a refocusing of the company rather than a closure.

Regulators take an interest

The arrangement drew scrutiny in the United States. The FTC was reported to have opened an informal inquiry into the Amazon–Adept arrangement, and US lawmakers cited it as an example of licensing deals used to avoid antitrust review.^[3] The point raised was about the shape of the deal rather than about any particular product: if a large company can bring in a startup's founders and license its technology without buying the company, the transaction may not pass through the merger review that a full acquisition would trigger.

Why it matters

For Adept, the announcement marked a change of direction — from a company pursuing both foundation models and an enterprise agent product to one focused on solutions that enable agentic AI.^[1] For Amazon, it brought a founding team and licensed technology into an AGI organization led by Rohit Prasad.^[2] The deal also became a reference case in discussions of how AI startups and large platforms combine: regulators and legislators pointed to it when arguing that licensing arrangements can move much of a company's value without a formal acquisition.^[3]