Partnering with Cassidy

Since the current batch of LLM-powered workflow tools began to pop up in 2022, I’ve been looking forward to a life after Zapier. My fellow process automation enthusiasts and I could stop building workflows with drag-and-drop interfaces and start simply telling the AI what we wanted. My early experiments with this new generation of tools usually began with exhilaration (”My first test mostly worked! A new era is upon us!”) and ended in frustration (”Nothing but my first test worked…and I’m not sure why.”). We had ditched the fiddly no-code UIs but replaced them with prompt engineering and blurry feedback loops.

When I used Cassidy for the first time in fall 2023, I had a different experience. Even in its earliest versions, Cassidy’s product gave me back the agency I’d missed using other tools. I could stand up an AI assistant with detailed instructions, create a knowledge base, and easily reference specific files without hoping the AI would infer my meaning. It reminded me of my first time using Notion 2.0 back in 2018. Where Notion struck the perfect balance of structured and unstructured data inside a note-taking tool, Cassidy found a similar harmony between the declarative powers of LLMs and the explicit affordances of earlier no-code tools. It felt like a product whose makers were intentionally declining to join the race for the most elegant, “AI-native” architecture or primitives unless those innovations served the user.

When we met the Cassidy founders, Justin Fineberg and Ian Woodfill, the origins behind their practical approach to AI workflow automation made more sense. In the run-up to founding Cassidy, Justin took to social media, educating the AI-curious with tutorial content that has earned over 50 million views to date. Ian had just wrapped two years of building software for the no-code development platform Bubble. They understood user needs and how to make AI work for real-world tasks, standing apart from the researcher- and theory-heavy teams occupying much of the startup landscape.

Excited to work with the team and happy users of their product, TheGP led Cassidy’s $3.7M seed round last November, investing $2M alongside Neo, Comma Capital, Spacecadet Ventures, Ride Ventures, and angels like Erik Goldman (Co-founder of Vanta), Jason Dorfman (CEO of Orum), and Zach Sims (CEO of Codecademy).

Since then, they’ve grown from a small group of enthusiastic pilot customers to over 12,000 companies using Cassidy today, ranging from startups automating RFP responses to public companies automating their sales enablement flows. We’re excited to support Justin, Ian, and their team as they continue to grow their customer base, evolve their product, and become an integral part of how companies operate with AI.