$ cat about.md

About

I'm Assaf. I've been building AI agents since 2015, since before anyone called them agents. Back then we called them bots, and people asked why.

Most of my work comes down to one idea: making machines useful to people. Lately it's the reverse too, making the web usable by machines.

When I'm not building, I'm usually helping others build. I angel invest in early stage AI startups as a scout for Sequoia.

## the story so far

  1. 2015

    ServiceFriend

    Where I started building conversational agents, years before anyone called them that. We built messaging systems where bots and humans worked together, and I was granted a US patent for real-time automated conversational agents. Meta acquired the company.

    US10303758B2 ↗

  2. then

    Tiv.ai

    My first startup: a personal assistant that lived on WhatsApp and helped people get things done. It grew to over 5 million users worldwide. We went through Y Combinator's Startup School in 2019.

  3. then

    Wix

    I came to build Wix's first AI agent, the chatbot supporting all Wix users, and grew the team from zero to 60 engineers across nine teams. Then LLMs arrived and disrupted everything we'd built, so we rebuilt around them.

  4. then

    monday.com

    Led the AI transformation across a company that runs a billion work tasks a year: launched AI Blocks, then a digital workforce of agents working inside boards. AI usage grew 100% month over month.

  5. 2023

    GPT Researcher

    An open source agent that researches any topic online and writes a report with citations. I built it before deep research was a product category. It has 29k stars on GitHub and gets cited in academic papers.

    github ↗scholar ↗

  6. 2024

    Tavily

    Co-founded Tavily, a search engine built for AI agents rather than people. It grew to over a million developers worldwide, with Fortune 500 customers. Nebius acquired it in 2026.

    tavily.com ↗

  7. now

    Ora

    Working on how agents can use businesses autonomously. Backed by Sequoia and Index.

    ora.ai ↗

## investing

I'm also a scout for Sequoia, investing in early stage AI startups. Some investments: LangChain, Anthropic, Engram Labs, Delphi, PiLabs (acq. by Microsoft), Runhouse (acq. by Anthropic).

## contact

The fastest way to reach me is email or a DM on X. If you're building agents, I probably want to hear about it.