Many startups and large technology companies are building AI agents and programs that can handle multi-step tasks without user supervision. Once available, these agents must work together to complete complex tasks such as booking and paying for flights, hotels, and excursions.
/dev/agents is a new company founded by former Google executives who helped develop Android in the early days of the smartphone era, believing that a new operating system was needed to unleash the full potential of AI agents. I am.
“Before Android existed, we all understood the potential of mobile, but as developers, it was just too difficult to build anything on mobile,” says the company's co-founder. says David Singleton (pictured above), CEO and CEO. “We're seeing the same thing again. We see the promise of AI, but as developers, it's really hard to build something good.”
Before launching /dev/agents, Singleton was CTO at Stripe and before that led AndroidWear at Google. Regarding /dev/agents, he argues that developers currently lack standard tools and systems for building AI agents, and wants to close that gap by creating an integrated platform that can become the operating system for the AI world. I'm thinking of filling it.
The company says its cloud-based operating system runs on a variety of devices and uses generative AI to display 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, investors in /dev/agents might agree as well.
The company announced this week that it has raised a $56 million seed round led by Index Ventures, with participation from Sarah Guo-founded venture firm Conviction Capital, and co-led by CapitalG, Alphabet's independent growth fund. Announced. A number of prominent technology leaders including Andrej Karpathy, co-founder of OpenAI, Alexander Wang, CEO of Scale AI, Nikesh Arora, CEO of Palo Alto Networks, and Andy Rubin, founder of Android. Participated in this round. Mr. Rubin also serves as an advisor to the company.
The deal values the company at $500 million, according to people familiar with the investment.
Many investors believe that fully functional AI agents are on the horizon, but acknowledge that the technological infrastructure for that future is not yet available. And while many companies are developing different parts of the AI agent framework, the backers of /dev/agents believe that new third-party operating systems could be the key to unlocking their full potential. We believe that there is.
Nina Achadjian, a partner at Index Ventures, said she jumped at the opportunity to back /dev/agents.
“This is a very difficult technical problem and a very big idea,” Achajan said. “But if there's one team that's going to do it, it's going to be the team that built Android and Stripe from the ground up.”
In addition to Singleton, /dev/agents was co-founded by Hugo Barra (CPO), who previously served as VP of Android Product Management at Google and led Meta's Oculus VR division. The company's other two co-founders include Ficus Kirkpatrick (CTO), an early Android engineer and VP of AR/VR at Meta. Nicholas Zytkov worked as the lead designer for Google Chrome and held senior positions at Dropbox and Figma.
Jill Chase, a partner at CapitalG, said that as a growth-stage fund, it is highly unusual for her firm to invest in pre-commercial companies. “We will do it if two things are true: first, if the market opportunity is so huge and generational,” she said. “The second criterion is that the team has to be really good. In this case, that couldn't be more clear.”
The company expects the first version of the product to be available by early to mid next year.
As for the business model for /dev/agents, Singleton said it won't be all that different from how Android currently monetizes its operating system.
“You can imagine a lot of commerce happening on this platform,” he said. He added that it could “take a cut” of the sales or charge users a subscription fee.