New York-based AI startup Crux Labs has raised more than $6 million in an oversubscribed funding round, emerging from stealth on October 29, 2026. The round was co-led by Benchstrength and Misneach, with participation from Analog Ventures and Pareto Holdings.
Crux Labs was co-founded by Julie Kheyfets, who serves as CEO, and Krishna Kulkarni, who serves as CTO. The company develops an AI agent evaluation and improvement platform designed to help enterprises align automated systems with human expertise and business requirements.
Its platform captures domain knowledge from subject-matter experts within existing enterprise workflows and converts that expertise into customized evaluations of AI agent performance. According to the company, the system can monitor 100% of production agent traffic in real time and use evaluation results to continuously improve agents deployed in production.
Crux Labs aims to address the challenges enterprises face in assessing AI agents at scale. Rather than relying solely on manual reviews of selected interactions, the platform enables organizations to evaluate agent performance against criteria informed by their own experts.
The company reports adoption among high-growth startups and Fortune 500 enterprises across healthcare, cybersecurity, financial services and other complex industries.
Kheyfets previously led Tractable AI’s North American operations and served as CEO of Block Renovation. Kulkarni previously led brand engineering at Meta, developed AI products at Checkr and held an engineering leadership role at Healthify. The co-founders met at Princeton University.
Crux Labs plans to use the new funding to expand its research and engineering capabilities and accelerate deployments with enterprise customers as it develops its AI agent evaluation technology.
