Every time an AI agent has to trawl Slack threads, Jira tickets and old pull requests to piece together something a company already knows, the customer pays for that work again. Uvi, an Israeli startup that emerged from stealth on Wednesday with $7.5 million in seed funding from investors including CT Innovations, Cardumen, Mana VC and 91 Ventures, says this repeated context-gathering is quietly inflating the cost of running agents on frontier models.

The firm says in-house agents built on frontier models, connected directly to six company systems, cost roughly eight times more than they needed in internal testing, mostly because of repeated context gathering rather than actual reasoning. 

Uvi co-founder and CEO Gilad Salinger tells The New Stack that models are rented, but context is owned.

“Developers are paying frontier prices for amnesia,” Salinger says. “Every quarter there’s a new model that is faster and cheaper, and every quarter the company’s memory of why it built things the way it did stays exactly where it was: in people’s heads, in old tickets, in Slack threads nobody will read again.”

He explains that Uvi takes that memory out of people and tools and puts it in one place every agent, on every model, can read. If developers need to swap the model tomorrow, they don’t have to relearn anything. Salinger insists that Uvi makes sure that memory information is actually usable.

“Context is unique to every company and demands a deep understanding of how that company defines its work, from what counts as a feature to how two departments communicate.”

Source link