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 tasks, such as booking and paying for flights, hotels and excursions.
/dev/agents, a new company started by ex-Google executives who helped develop Android in the early days of the smartphone era, believes it’s time to fully realize the potential of AI agents. requires a new operating system.
“Before Android existed, we could all see the promise of mobile, but as a developer, it was very difficult 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 really hard to build anything good.”
Before starting /dev/agents, Singleton was Stripe’s CTO, and before that, he led AndroidWear at Google. With /dev/agents, he argues that developers currently lack standardized tools and systems from which to build AI agents, and hopes to fill that gap by creating a unified platform that AI could be the world’s operating system.
The company says its cloud-based operating system will work across all devices, and will offer a personalized user interface, using generative AI.
“What we’re trying to do here is the same thing we did with Android,” Singleton said.
If that sounds promising to you, the investors at /dev/agents might agree.
This week, the company said it had raised a $56 million seed round led by Index Ventures and supported by Alphabet’s independent growth fund, Capital G, with participation from Convection Capital, a venture firm founded by Sarah Gow. is A number of prominent tech leaders also participated in the round, including OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathi, ScaleAI CEO Alexander Wang, Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, and Android founder Andy Rubin.
The deal valued the company at $500 million, according to a person with knowledge of the investment.
Many investors believe that fully functional AI agents are coming soon, but they still acknowledge that the technological infrastructure for that future is not yet in place. And although a large number of companies are developing different parts AI Agent FrameworkSupporters of /dev/agents 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 she jumped at the chance to back /dev/agents.
“It’s a very difficult technical problem, and a really big idea,” Achadjian said. “But if there was a 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), formerly VP of Product Management for Android at Google and leading Meta’s Oculus VR division. The company’s two other co-founders include Ficus Kirkpatrick (CTO), an early Android engineer and former VP of AR/VR at Meta; and Nicholas Jutkoff, who worked as a principal designer on Google Chrome and held senior roles at Dropbox and Figma.
Jill Chase, a partner at Capital G, said that as a growth-stage fund, it’s extremely rare for her firm to invest in a pre-product company. “We will do it when two things are right: First, when the market opportunity is so big and so generational,” he said. “The second criterion is that the team must be truly extraordinary. It couldn’t be more clear in this case.”
The company expects the first version of its product to be available early to mid next year.
As for /dev/agents’ business model, Singleton said it won’t be too different from how Android monetizes its operating system now.
“You can imagine there’s a lot of trading going on on this platform,” he said. “We will be able to either reduce sales or charge subscriptions from customers,” he added.
Credit : techcrunch.com
