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Image Credits:Bloomberg (opens in a new window) / Getty Images
AI



WHY AI AGENT STARTUP /DEV/AGENTS COMMANDED A MASSIVE $56M SEED ROUND AT A $500M
VALUATION

Marina Temkin
8:00 AM PST · November 28, 2024



Many startups and large tech companies are building AI agents or programs that
can handle multi-step tasks without user supervision. Once available, these
agents will need to collaborate with each other to complete complex jobs, such
as booking and paying for flights, hotels, and excursions.

/dev/agents, a new company started by former Google executives who helped
develop Android during the early days of the smartphone era, believes a new
operating system is needed to fully realize the potential of AI agents.




“Before Android existed, we could all see the promise of mobile, but as a
developer, it was just too hard to build anything on mobile,” said David
Singleton, the company’s co-founder and CEO (pictured above). “We’re seeing the
same thing again. We can see the promise of AI, but as a developer, it’s just
really hard to build anything good.”

Prior to launching /dev/agents, Singleton was the CTO of Stripe, and before
that, he led AndroidWear at Google. With /dev/agents, he argues that developers
currently don’t have standard tools and systems on top of which to build AI
agents, and hopes to fill that gap by creating a unified platform that can be
the operating system of the AI world.

The company says its cloud-based operating system will work across devices, and
using generative AI, will present personalized user interfaces.

“What we’re trying to do here is similar to what we did with Android,” Singleton
said.

If that sounds promising to you, /dev/agents’ investors might agree.

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This week, the company said it has raised a $56 million seed round led by Index
Ventures and co-led by Alphabet’s independent growth fund, CapitalG, with
participation from Conviction Capital, a venture firm founded by Sarah Guo. A
number of prominent tech leaders, including OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy,
Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang, Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, and Android
founder Andy Rubin also participated in the round.

The deal valued the company at $500 million, according to a person with
knowledge of the investment.

Many investors are convinced that fully-functional AI agents are coming soon,
but they still admit that the technical infrastructure for that future isn’t
available yet. And although a number of companies are developing different parts
of the AI agent framework,  /dev/agents’ backers believe that a new, third-party
operating system could be the key to unlocking their full potential.




Nina Achadjian, a partner at Index Ventures, said that she jumped at the
opportunity to back /dev/agents.

“It’s a super difficult technical problem, and a really big idea,” Achadjian
said. “But if there was one team to do it, the team that built Android and
Stripe from the ground up would be the team.”

In addition to Singleton, /dev/agents was co-founded by Hugo Barra (CPO), who
was previously VP of Android’s product management at Google and led Meta’s
Oculus VR division. The company’s two other co-founders include Ficus
Kirkpatrick (CTO), an early Android engineer and a former VP of AR/VR at Meta;
and Nicholas Jitkoff, who worked as a principal designer on Google Chrome and
held senior roles at Dropbox and Figma.

Jill Chase, a partner at CapitalG, said that as a growth-stage fund, it is
exceedingly rare for her firm to invest in a pre-product company. “We will do it
when two things are true: first, when the market opportunity is so massive and
generational,” she said. “The second criterion is the team has to be truly
exceptional. That could not be more clear in this instance.”

The company expects to have the first version of its product available by
early-to-mid next year.

As for /dev/agents’ business model, Singleton said it likely won’t be too
different from how Android is monetizing its operating system now.

“You can imagine a lot of commerce happening on this platform,” he said. “We
would be able to either take a cut” of sales or charge users for subscriptions,
he added.

Topics

AI, AI agents, Android, CapitalG, Index Ventures, operating systems, Startups
December 4
San Francisco
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leaders. Limited space.
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Marina Temkin

Reporter, Venture

@mtemkin
Marina Temkin is a venture capital and startups reporter at TechCrunch. Prior to
joining TechCrunch, she wrote about VC for PitchBook and Venture Capital
Journal. Earlier in her career, Marina was a financial analyst and earned a CFA
charterholder designation.
View Bio



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