‘Integrail is an independent platform, so it’s not attached to Google technology or Google LLMs or Google Docs or Google tools or Microsoft. It allows any nontechnical businessperson to automate any business task,’ says Integrail co-founder and Executive Chairman Ratmir Timashev.
Serial entrepreneur Ratmir Timashev is back, this time with a startup called Integrail that develops a platform for automating business workflows using AI agents.
Timashev is best-known as the co-founder of data protection and management vendor Veeam Software, which in 2020 was sold to private equity. Fast forward to 2025, and Timashev is now working with a former Veeam employee to build Integrail
Timashev told CRN that while the entire IT industry is talking about AI agents as the next evolution of AI, most of the technology is built within other platforms. Integrail, he said, is taking a different approach.
[Related: ServiceNow Launches Major Focus On Agentic AI With Emphasis On Channel Partners]
“Integrail is an independent platform, so it’s not attached to Google technology or Google LLMs or Google Docs or Google tools or Microsoft,” he said. “It allows any nontechnical businessperson to automate any business task.”
Integrail is also taking some unique approaches to agentic AI, including staying focused on the needs of midsize businesses and making it easy for channel partners to help customers take advantage of the technology, Timashev said. Furthermore, he said, Integrail is LLM-agnostic.
“We work with Google and Microsoft LLMs, with open-source LLMs like Llama or closed-source LLMs like OpenAI,” he said. “We work with any LLMs. And by the way, we benchmark LLMs. So for certain tasks within your workflow, what LLM can give you better results in terms of cost and accuracy? We will help find the balance between cost and accuracy.”
There’s a lot going on at Integrail and its quest to build an LLM-agnostic agentic AI platform. Here’s more of CRN’s conversation with Timashev
How do you define Integrail?
Integrail is a platform to automate any business workflow using AI agents. So what is an AI agent? AI agents are basically the next evolution of AI technology where you put an LLM, let’s say ChatGPT, into an environment, and you give that LLM tools to interact with the environment, for instance, to get information and to send information or to perform some actions. It could be any LLM. You give this LLM tools and knowledge—it could be your corporate knowledge, your personal knowledge. Then you give it tools, which are basically APIs that perform different actions such as take data from Salesforce, put that data in the table, look at this data, format this data, and then put it somewhere else or perform some action such as publish it on the website. If you provide LLMs with tools and knowledge, it becomes an agent. An agent is first, autonomous and actionable, unlike just an LLM or, say, ChatGPT, which are passive things you chat with.
Basically, everybody is talking about AI agents being the next evolution and future of AI technology. All the big companies like Google, Microsoft, Salesforce talk about AI agents and agentic AI. All of them are building these capabilities within their platforms. Integrail is an independent platform, so it’s not attached to Google technology or Google LLMs or Google Docs or Google tools or Microsoft. It allows any nontechnical businessperson to automate any business task. For example, a book flow. An AI agent could be set to read five articles on Monday mornings from The Wall Street Journal or some other publications, summarize them, then create a LinkedIn post on those articles based on that person’s previous posts and send an email based on his or her email history. This simple workflow I just described requires multiple steps. Our platform can build that workflow and create this agent.
The agent I described is of medium complexity. It could be a simple agent just to do the LinkedIn post. It could be more complex, like read the article, summarize, create the LinkedIn post, then grab a creative image showing the user in Hawaii on the beach, and then add the image as part of a LinkedIn post saying, ‘I’m sitting on the beach in Hawaii, and I’m reading The Wall Street Journal. And here’s my ideas about this article.”
This is basically what Integrail is. It’s an agentic AI platform, or AI agent platform. People use this new term ‘agentic AI.’ It lets nontechnical people drag and drop different modules and builds a workflow and then tests it and uses it in business or personal life. Again, our platform is designed for nontechnical people. It’s a no-code platform.
We also plan to create a marketplace for these agents so you don’t need to build your own, either for personal or business use. You can come and just reuse agents other users of our platform created.
The original idea came about 20 months ago. Basically, my partner in Integrail, Anton Antich, who used to work for me at Veeam, likes to read a lot of scientific research papers specifically about AI. And there was a paper published by some guys who created a team of agent AI agents to play Minecraft or something else. Basically he said, ‘Let’s create the platform that allows us to build this.’ So the original idea was 20 months ago. We started building the platform and released the first version in beta in the August or September timeframe. Now we are announcing the company coming out of stealth mode and Peter Guagenti joining as CEO.
In describing the company, you talked about using AI to manage digital workflows. Is Integrail competing with companies like ServiceNow?
Yes, absolutely. But all companies like ServiceNow, Salesforce and Workday are doing this. Workday just announced that, within Workday, you can create your own digital workers and you can be a manager. So everybody is talking about AI agents. At the recent big Microsoft and Google conferences, all CEOs go on stage, and the only thing they’re talking about is AI agents being the future. So, yes, we will compete, to a certain extent, with these companies including ServiceNow.
We have not yet announced it, but we will in the next couple of months, our landscape is different. Our focus is midsize enterprises. Not large enterprises. Not SMBs. Our focus is midsize enterprises, and we will be channel-driven.
We have three main differentiators. The first is we will offer complete services and end-to-end solutions. Right now, if you talk to any midsize enterprise, the CEOs at all these companies tell department heads like the chief marketing officer, chief revenue officer, HR, procurement, legal, that they have to reduce costs and increase productivity. ‘Please tell me how you are going to use AI to do that because the board of directors is asking me about this thing called AI. How we’re going to use AI to get the company an advantage, reduce costs and increase productivity.’ Chief marketing officers, for example, they have the budget, not a lot, but $100,000 or $200,000 to spend this year on AI initiatives. They have a directive from the board, from the CEO, to come up with new projects to provide a competitive advantage, increased productivity and reduced cost. All of them have this project. But not only do they not know how to use AI, they don’t even know what to automate. They don’t know they can use AI to generate new white papers or accelerate the generation of white papers, to market those white papers through different channels, generate and capture leads, and so on. [We will work with companies] to discuss priorities for this year and how to use AI to automate different workflows that align with those priorities. And we guarantee the increase in productivity and reduction in cost. We will offer end-to-end solutions, not just the tool, which is our platform. And, by the way, besides Microsoft and Google and ServiceNow, there are a few other competitors in the market, but all of them position themselves as the tool. People don’t need the tool. They need a complete solution. So we are building professional services that develop a complete solution. We will help define the project through working with a company’s leadership and through workshops. Then we will spec it out. We will use our platform to develop that solution. Then we will put it in production and then enable nontechnical people to extend this solution, to add additional notes in a workflow process if they need to expand it using our platform. So the main differentiator is an end-to-end solution, using our professional services as well as do training and enablement using our platform.
The second differentiator is the channel. We will offer our own professional services, and plan to take them through the channel. Channel partners who today do Salesforce integration or marketing integration or HR integration or ServiceNow integration, all business process automation, mostly midsize partners and not companies like Accenture, we’re going to come to them and tell them we have already sold the professional services, and we need partners to deliver them. We will help. We will train them on our platform.
Our third differentiator is that we are LLM-agnostic. We work with Google and Microsoft LLMs, with open-source LLMs like Llama, or closed-source LLMs like OpenAI. We work with any LLM. And, by the way, we benchmark LLMs. So for certain tasks within your workflow, what LLM can give you better results in terms of cost and accuracy? We will help find the balance between cost and accuracy.
Have you signed any channel partners yet?
No. We are talking to some. We’re just now announcing the company, but I’m just telling you overall strategy, how it’s going to be different, and that’s what we are going to build in the next three to 12 months. We are going to build professional services, and we are building the channel.
How will Integrail charge for its AI agent services?
For professional services, we’re going to have several packages. It boils down to how much our our consultants are going to cost per hour, $200 or $300 or whatever. But we’re going to have a simple package, like a $25,000 package, a $50,000 package, maybe a $100,000 package that includes certain types of workflows, a certain number of hours required for the professional services.
For the LLMs, others on a per-token base. We are charging, depending on how you use our platform, per token or according to the task. … You can think about our platform and our services as a digital worker. Today businesses outsource certain tasks to low-cost locations in Latin America, Asia, India or Eastern Europe. It could be sales, marketing, customer support. A customer support call today might cost $20 or $50. We will charge you $2, but we will automate everything in the customer call. So we will charge for the digital AI worker $2 versus $20 per call, but it will feel and look and sound like a real person answering real customer support questions.
What is your role at Integrail?
I’m the executive chairman, an investor and an advisor. I help with strategy. I don’t work day to day. That’s why we hired Peter Guagenti as the new CEO, and Anton Antic as the chief product officer. I’m a co-founder. I helped Anton start the business and define the go-to-market strategy. I don’t spend 100 percent of my time on Integrail. I spend maybe 25 percent of my time as an adviser because I’m involved. I’m also involved with another new company with my traditional partner, Andrei Baronov, called Object First. I’m also not involved there day to day because we have built a great management team. Object First is run by CEO David Bennett and is doing fantastic. Last year we closed $12.5 million. We released the product exactly two years ago, in February 2023, and that year we generated $2.5 million in revenue. This year, we’re planning $40 million. So we’re growing extremely fast, and the company is doing fantastic.