Many companies today offer AI as nothing more than a chatbot embedded within their apps. You type or dictate a request, and the AI attempts to fulfill it. However, the experience often feels awkward. A text-based interface doesn't always provide a smooth user journey — for instance, when using a travel app to book a full itinerary, you may have to wade through endless text. According to the founders of CopilotKit, this approach fails to fully leverage what AI agents and large language models (LLMs) can achieve. The company's co-founders, Atai Barkai (pictured above, right) and Uli Barkai (pictured above, left), believe the future lies in enabling agents to operate within applications, understand user actions, perform tasks, and display useful interfaces instead of merely returning lengthy text blocks.

The company's widely adopted AG-UI protocol is designed to address the first part of this vision. This open-source standard defines how AI agents connect and communicate with user interfaces — such as web browsers or apps — offering features like streaming chat, front-end tool calls, and state sharing to support human-in-the-loop functionality. In essence, AG-UI provides developers with the framework and tools needed to deploy AI agents directly inside their applications. CopilotKit is also developing an enterprise toolkit built on top of AG-UI, adding support, self-hosted deployment options, and other essential features for businesses considering integrating agents into their products. The flexible user interface is a particular standout. "The agent can reply to you, not just with blocks of text, but with interactive UIs that are defined by your own company," Atai explained. "If, for example, a user asks for a breakdown of revenue by category, instead of getting this kind of big, impenetrable paragraph, you get a pie chart, and it’s your own design of the pie chart that the user can interact with. So all of your agents can, very trivially, speak to a UI and use these catalog of components and show that to users."

Atai also noted that CopilotKit's toolkit gives developers complete control over how much the AI agent can modify the UI, allowing them to choose between a "pixel-perfect" interface or broad building blocks that the AI can assemble as needed. The funding comes on the heels of strong adoption for both AG-UI and CopilotKit. The protocol, which works alongside the widely used Model Context Protocol (MCP) and Agent2Agent (A2A) protocol, is now supported by major AI infrastructure providers like Google, Microsoft, Amazon, and Oracle, as well as popular frameworks such as LangChain, Mastra, PydanticAI, and Agno. Atai said CopilotKit and AG-UI — the company's strongest claim to ecosystem relevance — see millions of installs per week, and a significant portion of Fortune 500 companies are using the protocol and the startup's tools in production. Meanwhile, CopilotKit counts enterprise heavyweights like Deutsche Telekom, Docusign, Cisco, and S&P Global as customers. To capitalize on this growing interest, the company is also launching CopilotKit Enterprise Intelligence, a self-hostable offering that bundles various infrastructure features to fully deploy agents within apps.

CopilotKit faces intense competition in the enterprise agent tools market. Cloud platform Vercel's open-source AI SDK helps developers build AI applications with similar capabilities, and Assistant-ui offers components for creating AI chat interfaces. Additionally, OpenAI's Apps SDK provides an option for building richer interfaces, though only within ChatGPT. Atai argues that CopilotKit distinguishes itself by taking a horizontal, enterprise-friendly approach rather than a vertically integrated one. Instead of offering a full-stack AI platform, CopilotKit aims to support whatever agent framework, cloud provider, or backend an enterprise already uses. "If there are two things we hear in almost every single enterprise conversation, enterprises want optionality and they want self-hosting," he said. "Maybe they’re already using the Google, Amazon, Oracle, Microsoft, LangChain, Mastra stacks. They want optionality, and they want self-hosting, and these are two things that they don’t really get in the Vercel stack."

Maintaining that open positioning will be crucial. Companies that build on top of their own open-source infrastructure often face a tension: they want their technology to remain a neutral standard, but they also need to build a business around it. However, Atai said that AG-UI is a fully open protocol, and CopilotKit's commercial product is designed to harden the open-source stack for enterprises, not replace it. "They’re very much complementary. Our strategy is to be the default choice in the ecosystem, and then to monetize the top enterprises," Uli, the startup's head of growth, added. "So it’s very much in our interest that the open source is the best out there, and the 95% of users can just go build and get started without paying anyone or talking to anyone."

The company currently has about 25 employees and plans to use the new funding to grow its team.