IrisGo, a startup backed by Andrew Ng, looks to become the AI desktop buddy you never knew you needed

Source: TechCrunch

Industry insiders say the next big thing in AI is “proactive” systems: agents that can anticipate a user’s needs — and fulfill them — before the user even knows what those needs are.

IrisGo Overview

IrisGo, a startup backed by Andrew Ng’s AI Fund, closed a $2.8 million seed round earlier this year. The company is building a desktop companion for PCs that learns a user’s daily workflows and automates them with little to no human prompting. Iris was co‑founded by Jeffrey Lai, a former Apple engineer who helped build the Chinese language version of Siri (Iris is “Siri” spelled backwards).

The core idea is simple: show Iris how to do something once, and it remembers that process for future automated use — no repeat instructions needed.

Demo

During a conversation with TechCrunch, Lai demonstrated Iris placing a coffee order online. Iris recorded the steps to select a latte from Philz Coffee, fill out credit‑card information, and complete the purchase. When Lai asked Iris to repeat the order, the agent complied automatically.

Features

Skills Library

Iris includes a built‑in library of ready‑to‑use workflows such as:

• Email drafting
• Invoice processing
• Report building
• Document summarization

The system also observes a user’s desktop behavior and adds new tasks to its potential action list.

Coding Assistant

A coding assistant, similar in concept to OpenAI’s Codex or Anthropic’s Claude Code, helps developers as they work.

Privacy and On‑Device Processing

Iris is designed to process a large portion of data on‑device, offering stronger privacy protections than cloud‑heavy alternatives. The architecture is hybrid: complex tasks may be sent to the cloud, but this occurs only when explicitly authorized by the user and uses end‑to‑end encryption, as described in the company’s responsible AI policy.

Target Audience and Vision

“Our target audience is knowledge workers — white‑collar companies,” Lai explained. While frontier models are powerful, AI‑assisted office work can still feel manual and repetitive. Iris aims to shift repetitive clerical tasks to autonomous agents, allowing humans to focus on high‑level conceptual work.

Funding and Partnerships

Support from Andrew Ng — co‑founder of the seminal deep‑learning research team Google Brain — helped secure credibility. Ng’s AI Fund led the seed round, and the company also received backing from Nvidia and Google. Lai and co‑founder connected with Ng through a shared Carnegie Mellon alumni network, demoed Iris, and secured the investment.

Availability and Future Plans

IrisGo recently launched beta versions of its macOS and Windows apps. The company is pursuing pre‑installation deals with laptop manufacturers and has already struck a partnership with Acer (Tech in Asia article). Lai hopes to secure similar agreements with other device makers soon.