Snowflake Startup Spotlight: Superduper Agents

Welcome to Snowflake’s Startup Spotlight, where we ask startup founders about the problems they’re solving, the apps they’re building and the lessons they’ve learned during their startup journey. In this edition, meet Timo Hagenow, Co-Founder and CEO of Superduper, and read how its agent orchestration platform integrates AI models with existing data infrastructure to drive horizontal enterprise AI adoption. 

What inspires you as a founder?

I’m inspired to bring together ambitious and smart people to work on a common goal of pushing technological advancement.

How would you explain your company in 30 seconds?

Superduper offers a platform for enterprise agent orchestration that integrates your existing data infrastructure, databases and other enterprise systems and tools with AI agents. It enables business users to answer any question about all their data with exact references, as well as create custom agents to automate complex tasks. 

What problem does Superduper aim to solve? 

AI models today have deep knowledge and expertise in pretty much any domain, and AI agents can automate processes and tasks that require humanlike thinking. This opens unthinkably large doors of efficiency. The big challenge most organizations face is how to connect these capabilities with internal data in a secure way and to then make the resulting insane functionality available to their people at scale. 

Our Superduper Agents platform lets you answer questions about your data with precise references, automate complex reporting tasks and even build AI features directly into your products and services. It allows you to create isolated installations of our agent app for different teams, departments and business functions, so that each one only has access to the data they need. 

How did you first identify this problem and decide to build a company around it?

My co-founder Duncan and I were confronted with the challenge of connecting data with AI firsthand in the startup we founded and sold prior to Superduper. There, we developed and trained our own models for ecommerce search and navigation, and brought them to large-scale production at brands such as Adidas with our own infrastructure. 

Superduper, with our new agent platform, feeds off this journey. We are also a bit lucky that LLM models, with their agentic capabilities, have become so powerful, since we had already built the perfect setup to unleash that productivity. 

Why did you choose to build on Snowflake?

Building a backend system that allows you to use natural language not just to ask any question against all your data but also to automate pretty much any task using your data — and then integrating that with any of your other software systems and tools — is a monster of a project. You would need engineers who are on the edge of AI development to solve so many details and make so many choices while navigating a fast-moving technological landscape. And then to deploy, monitor and manage that system with a framework that allows the end user to leverage it? That’s a whole other story. 

With the Superduper Agents platform, however, you can take advantage of years of development and decades of experience with a couple of clicks and simple installation steps. Snowflake provides a unified environment to host compute, containers and services directly at the source of the data, inside a managed and secure environment. It’s a no-brainer.

How has the Snowflake Native App Framework been pivotal in shaping your startup's growth and development strategy?

The Snowflake Native App Framework allows us to offer our platform with robust security controls and compute efficiency, as everything runs behind the Snowflake firewall and on the same servers. 

It enabled us to provide Snowflake customers with scalable deployment of groundbreaking AI solutions right where their data resides, offering robust data security and minimal overhead at a click of a button. That’s a huge benefit.

What does the global GTM exposure and efficiency of Snowflake Marketplace mean for Superduper?

Many of the most interesting organizations nurture their data on Snowflake and Snowflake Marketplace, so the GTM exposure is huge. Snowflake Marketplace allows us to provide our platform with maximum convenience for the user but also for us: from installation to deployment and billing. That efficiency and simplification in development and sales, plus the support, played a key role in our decision to prioritize the development of our platform as a Snowflake Native App.

What's a lesson you learned the hard way during your startup journey?

A versatile platform that can do many things may promise huge impact and reward, but it is also challenging to build and market. Early on, it's better to focus on a single, clear solution or functionality that is easy to communicate, even if it means underselling the full potential of your product.

Learn more about AI agent orchestration for your data infrastructure and tools at https://superduper.io/, try the Superduper Agents app on Snowflake Marketplace, or read the company’s post on the Snowflake Builders Blog on Medium for technical details. If you’re a startup building on Snowflake, check out the Powered by Snowflake Startup Program for info on how Snowflake can support your goals.