Meta Plans $200/Month AI Agent as Premium Offering

Forward-deployed engineering (FDE) has become a core operating model for enterprise AI vendors, with engineers embedded at customer sites to integrate AI into live workflows. The critical distinction is whether FDE generates reusable product capabilities that accelerate future deployments, or simply accumulates as custom services labor. The difference determines whether vendors build durable competitive advantage or unsustainable delivery costs.

Wafer, a one-year-old San Francisco startup, raised $40 million in Series A funding led by Marathon Management Partners and Chemistry, achieving a valuation above $200 million. The company uses AI agents to optimize open-source models for specific business workloads across non-Nvidia chips. Wafer has reportedly received acquisition offers and is positioning itself as an alternative inference provider for enterprises seeking to run AI models on diverse hardware.

AIR has raised $50 million to build a platform that discovers AI agents operating within companies, continuously monitors the skills and add-ons they use, and blocks unwanted behavior. The funding addresses a growing operational challenge as enterprises deploy multiple AI agents without full visibility into their capabilities and actions. The platform serves companies seeking to maintain control and security over AI agent deployments.

Perplexity launched hybrid compute for its Computer platform, allowing a single AI agent to split work between cloud-based frontier models and locally-running open-weight models on Apple silicon Macs. Sensitive data is routed to the local machine via a trained PII classifier called a Privacy Gate, ensuring confidential information never leaves the device while the agent maintains task context. The feature is available today for enterprise customers and Pro/Max subscribers on macOS 15 or later.