As organizations race to harness AI’s potential, they face significant hurdles in deploying and scaling AI solutions effectively across teams. The complexity of AI implementation often creates bottlenecks, limiting adoption to technical specialists while excluding key business stakeholders. Salt AI addresses this challenge with a unified collaboration platform that democratizes AI development through its intuitive visual interface while maintaining powerful capabilities for technical users. The Los Angeles-based company enables organizations to securely build, deploy, and scale AI solutions through a combination of drag-and-drop simplicity and full-code flexibility. With integrations for all major LLMs and 30+ enterprise data sources, Salt AI is positioning itself as the engine powering enterprise AI adoption.
LA TechWatch caught up with Salt AI EVP Charlie Basil to learn more about the business, the company’s strategic plans, recent round of funding, and much, much more…
Who were your investors and how much did you raise?
Seed round, $3M, The funding round was led by Morpheus Ventures with participation from Struck Capital, and Irregular Expressions. The investment will accelerate development of Salt’s proprietary AI orchestration and collaboration platform and expand its market presence.
Tell us about your product or service.
Salt offers a unified AI collaboration environment where organizations can securely connect their firewalled data to build AI automations, agentic workflows, and bespoke AI solutions. With a visual drag-and-drop interface, and full-code capabilities, every member of an organization can collaborate in real-time to build powerful AI on the Salt platform. Teams can deploy in one click to Salt’s cloud infrastructure that auto-scales to meet the real-time needs of any use case.
What inspired the start of Salt AI?
We built the Salt platform as the backend to enable rapid feature development for PlaiDay, a consumer mobile experience focused on generative art, and ultimately realized we had solved all the major pain points for rapidly developing and deploying AI at scale. And we realized that taking to market our backend as a B2B SaaS solution was a better and bigger opportunity than the PlaiDay consumer app.
How is it different?
The space is very noisy, with a lot of tools using similar language to describe their feature set. It does feel crowded at first blush, however there are only a small number of significant competitors. Salt differentiates itself by enabling team collaboration on AI workflows. It does this by providing a robust and powerful visual-first toolkit that enables non-technical stakeholders (executives, product managers, designers, marketers, etc) to build AI; alongside a full-code toolkit that enables engineers to get down to the bare metal and have complete control over their solutions. Salt is the only platform that has fully featured solutions for both user types.
What market are you targeting and how big is it?
Salt is a horizontal solution with broad potential to impact any vertical where AI can be put to use. At launch we are focusing on specific functions within an organization such as Marketing, Human Resources, and Operations – and providing powerful out-of-the-box workflows to help professionals automate and scale their work. We are also targeting product teams building bespoke AI and empowering them with collaboration tools and speed to market.
What’s your business model?
The typical SaaS business model that monetizes with seats, consumption, and premium features. We offer a free tier to enable users to spend time unlocking the power of Salt prior to subscribing.
What was the funding process like?
We spoke with several potential investors and fielded a lot of interest, especially from technical investors who understand the underlying technologies. Ultimately, we chose investors who understood and supported our vision, and could provide strategic support to advance our mission.
What are the biggest challenges that you faced while raising capital?
A lot of investors are focused on vertical point solutions today. There exists a lot of opportunity with those solutions, and perhaps they appear to be a straighter line to quick wins. Whereas the Salt platform can power all of those vertical solutions, and also enable organizations to build their own powerful, custom solutions in-house. Salt offers a large opportunity, and a bigger bet on how AI will implemented and brought to market in the future.
Additionally, an investor needs to understand the technical underpinnings, and challenges, of implementing AI. We’re still very early in the adoption curve, so a lot of the conversation is hypothetical for most. For us, we’ve already lived it daily while taking our PlaiDay app to market. So we come at the problem with very specific,\ hands-on experience. And as a result, we have a well-defined understanding of the challenges companies are facing, and will face, in deploying AI. And we’ve built the right solution for those circumstances. Our investors understand it.
What factors about your business led your investors to write the check?
First, our team. The majority of startups don’t have the track record of success at scale that our founders bring. Second, the vision.
What are the milestones you plan to achieve in the next six months?
This is a seed round. We’re still very early. Our goals are user growth, and product feedback, and iteration.
What advice can you offer companies in Los Angeles that do not have a fresh injection of capital in the bank?
Fundraising is difficult, especially for first-time founders. Often times you can get conflicting feedback from investors. VC A says zig. VC B says zag. It’s easy to get into a cycle of chasing your tail, over-tinkering your pitch, and losing your north star. Refining on feedback is good, and important, to a point – but only as it helps clarify and articulate your vision. Not every investor will “get it.” Stay true to your vision, keep going and find your fit.
Where do you see the company going now over the near term?
Continuing to focus on features and capabilities that help our users Put AI Into Action.
What is your favorite restaurant in LA?
Proudly Serving in Hermosa Beach (Smash Burgers, duck fat fries, and pinball).
