Blocks AI Agents Cross The Chasm To Mainstream No-Code Development

Blocks founders Michal Lupu (R) and Tal Haramati (L)

Blocks

Tel Aviv-based no-code AI platform Blocks today announced a $10 million seed round led by monday.com, its first-ever investment in a startup, with participation from Qumra Capital and Entree Capital. Combining AI app developer with smart AI agents, Blocks allows any professional to build custom work tools and intelligent AI agents through simple conversation.

Founded recently by two monday.com alumni, CEO Michal Lupu (led growth and strategy at monday.com for 7 years) and CTO Tal Haramati (led technology at monday.com for 9 years), Blocks attempts to solve the type of challenge that has slowed down the adoption of previous emerging technologies. This was identified years ago by Geoffrey Moore as the significant gap, or “chasm,” between early adopters of disruptive technology and the mainstream market. To cross the chasm, technology companies must develop a “whole product,” as Moore called it, that addresses the customer’s complete needs, not just the core technology.

Today, we see it in a recent study from MIT, which found that 95% of AI pilots fail. “The core barrier to scaling,” says the study, using today’s term for crossing the chasm, “is not infrastructure, regulation, or talent. It is learning. Most GenAI systems do not retain feedback, adapt to context, or improve over time.” The Blocks team is determined to correct this and help everybody in an organization leap over this “barrier to scaling.”

Lupu says that at monday.com, they developed a platform allowing “everyone to build their own software to manage their own work processes.” With Blocks, “we want to create an AI platform that allows everyone to develop their own AI tools and AI agents that help them build the apps that also do the work for them.”

Leading Blocks’ mission “to democratize AI development” is Ella, their “builder agent.” Haramati explains the agent consists of three layers: The design layer, “what people see,” a customizable user interface; the logic layer, the “brain that manages agents and workflows”; and the data layer, where all the relevant information lives. Haramati stresses the complete control by the users and their ability “to manage it, to change it, to tweak it, to make it exactly fit what they want. You don’t have to get into the code to understand what happens behind the scenes.”

Following their experience at monday.com, Blocks’ founders want to improve the productivity of enterprise teams by helping them build customized AI tools that integrate seamlessly into their workflows. Over the last few months, they have already achieved this in various industries and diverse settings, transforming a complex, everyday process into an innovative, personalized tool. Examples Lupu provides include a hospital that developed an intelligent agent to manage doctors’ and nurses’ shifts; a logistics company that manages suppliers and payments through Blocks, using an agent that extracts information from invoices and triggers automated workflows; and a large farm in Australia that runs all its operations on Blocks’ platform, from production and shipping processes to an intelligent agent that predicts output quality, and the daily management of employees and customers.

“This [AI] world is changing so fast,” says Lupu, “and we believe we have an excellent opportunity to build a big business,” addressing the specific AI scaling challenge they have identified. Larry Ellison agrees that this is the sweet (and hottest?) spot of the AI-for-the-enterprise market right now. Yesterday, on Oracle’s earnings call, Ellison said: “The new [applications] that we’re building, they’re nothing other than a bunch of AI agents that we generate that are linked together with workflow.”

Monday.com originated as an internal tool at website builder Wix.com to address communication and transparency challenges as Wix rapidly scaled. The tool was spun off as a separate startup—monday.com—in 2014, with Wix as its first customer and supporter. Ten years later, a tool developed based on the experience of its founders at monday.com, is launched as Blocks. “We are the grandchildren,” says Haramati.