AI agents are launching into product management, and one startup in the space is super-charging its growth with a fresh round of funding.
The startup, ThriveAI, just launched from stealth and announced it raised $1.2 million in pre-seed funding, Business Insider has learned exclusively. 500 Global led the funding round, which was oversubscribed. Iterative and Hustle Fund also participated.
ThriveAI was founded in 2024 by Ishwar Dhanuka and Brian Ngo, a pair of former product leads who cut their teeth at various Big Tech firms before teaming up to build the startup.
Dhanuka was a lead product manager at Google from 2020 to 2024, where he grew engagement at Google Maps, while Ngo previously held software engineering and management roles at Slack, Palantir, and Google.
The pair created ThriveAI because, throughout their careers as product managers, they were bogged down by numerous small tasks, meetings, and other administrative work. These job functions took time away from the creative work that they’d rather be doing as PMs, such as designing a better-working tool or developing a new product for users.
That’s where ThriveAI comes in: the startup’s AI agents act as junior product managers that work alongside their human counterparts and take over the grunt work that keeps more senior product managers preoccupied from completing high-value projects.
ThriveAI’s tech integrates into Slack and Microsoft Teams, flags issues, and synthesizes and catalogues data. Human PMs can delegate work to ThriveAI agents, the same way they’d interact with any human junior employee.
Dhanuka, ThriveAI’s CEO, told Business Insider that employees at the startup are using tools internally like AI code editor startup Cursor and that they recently spun up a dev agent that takes Slack requests and makes code changes.
ThriveAI’s pre-seed funding round will go toward training the AI agents to complete additional PM-related tasks at a high level, Dhanuka said. Since the PM role is incredibly broad and can span from anything including analyzing user feedback to monitoring metric, coordinating with teams, and keeping an eye on the marketing, building out the tech’s capabilities is the number one goal right now.
“We’re being selective about where we go deeper, prioritizing reliability over novelty, because the goal is to make Thrive feel like a real teammate PMs can trust,” he said. “That includes things like synthesizing, feedback, training product health, and even monitoring competitors to give teams sharper context during planning.
As agentic AI continues to captivate Silicon Valley, VCs have backed other startups that are using the tech to aid workers. These so-called copilots can help coders code, lawyers draft documents, and other knowledge workers complete the more rote aspects of their jobs, such as filling out a customer relationship management database or sending cold sales emails.
AI coding juggernaut Poolside raised a $500 million Series B in late 2024, while legal tech darling Harvey, which uses AI to help lawyers answer complex research questions, raised a $300 million Series D in February 2025. Artisan, meanwhile, a general tool to replace some human employees, rather, their repetitive work, with AI, raised a $25 million Series A last month.
ThriveAI is also one of the many startups founded by Palantir alumni that have landed venture funding. Other AI startups run by the so-called Palantir Mafia include legal contract management startup Ironclad; AI code search tool Sourcegraph; and senior medicare advisory platform Chapter.
Check out the 16-slide pitch deck ThriveAI used to launch from stealth and raise its $1.2 million pre-seed funding round.
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