Poetic: Turning Enterprise Procedures into Evolving Software
June 10, 2026 — Kleiner Perkins partner Leigh Marie Braswell details the firm’s second bet on Poetic, leading the 500M valuation after backing the seed round.
Investment thesis
Poetic addresses enterprise AI’s production reliability gap: models that demo well but fail on multi-hour, high-stakes workflows with thousands of unwritten rules. The platform lets operations teams describe processes in natural language and compiles them into deterministic, auditable execution.
Traction highlights
- Eight-figure run rate and profitability in 2025 with four employees
- Team includes leaders from Palantir, UiPath, Ramp, Scale, Retool
- Deployments at largest enterprises with highest accuracy requirements
Founder background
Markie Wagner is a Thiel Fellow and former ML engineer at Google and Waymo. She previously ran Delphi Labs, an ML consultancy deploying AI for large organizations, before founding Poetic (originally Forge) in 2023.
Market context
The intelligent process automation market is forecast to reach $35.8B by 2030, with financial services, healthcare, and government as primary verticals.
Strategic positioning
OpenAI’s participation alongside Founders Fund and First Harmonic reflects conviction that Poetic’s low-token, deterministic execution model complements — rather than replaces — frontier LLM infrastructure.