Minicor, a Bay Area startup that builds AI agents to automate legacy desktop application workflows, has raised $3.8 million in seed funding. The company said the funding round, led by IA Ventures, with participation from Y Combinator, Pioneer Fund, Robinhood Ventures, Garage Capital and others, will be used to continue developing technology giving businesses using old systems access to AI-driven automation, bypassing RPA.
The company, launched in 2024, said it’s challenging for enterprises using older software systems that lack modern integration capabilities to deploy AI automation. Seventy percent of Fortune 500 businesses still rely on desktop applications without APIs, it noted, making it difficult to incorporate those systems into AI-driven workflows.
According to Minicor, organizations traditionally have relied on RPA to automate interactions with these applications. While effective, it claims RPA implementations can require substantial engineering resources to develop and maintain. Newer AI-powered computer-use agents offer an alternative but can be slower than manual data entry if they’re running on older applications.
Minicor says its technology enables AI agents to learn how legacy applications operate, create automations and maintain them over time. The resulting interfaces allow AI systems to interact with desktop software similarly to applications that offer native APIs.
“Minicor turns legacy desktop software into endpoints that AI can call like any other API,” said Faizaan Chishtie, co-founder and CEO of Minicor. “Our agents learn how the software works, build the automations and keep them running.”
The approach could provide enterprises with another option for extending AI-powered automation to existing technology infrastructure without replacing legacy applications.