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Many startups and big 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 created 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 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 launching /dev/agents, Singleton was CTO at Stripe, and before that, he led AndroidWear at Google. With /dev/agents, he says developers currently don’t have standard tools and systems with which to build AI agents, and he hopes to bridge that gap by creating a unified platform that can be the operating system for the AI world.
The company says its cloud-based operating system will work across devices and, using generative artificial intelligence, offer personalized user interfaces.
“What we’re trying to do here is similar to what we did with Android,” Singleton said.
If this sounds promising to you, /dev/agents investors might agree.
The company said this week that 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, an investment firm founded by Sarah Gu. A number of prominent technology leaders also participated in the tour, including OpenAI co-founder Andrei Karpathy, Scale AI 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 familiar with the investment.
Many investors are convinced that fully functional AI agents will come soon, but they still admit that the technical infrastructure for that future is not yet in place. Although a number of companies are developing different parts of… AI agent frameworkproponents of /dev/agents believe that a new third-party operating system could be the key to unlocking their full potential.
Nina Akajian, partner at Index Ventures, said she jumped at the opportunity to back /dev/agents.
“It’s a very 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 it.”
In addition to Singleton, /dev/agents is co-founded by Hugo Barra (CPO), who was previously vice president of Android product management at Google and led Meta’s Oculus VR division. The company’s other two founders are Ficus Kirkpatrick (CTO), one of Android’s early engineers and former VP of AR/VR at Meta; and Nicholas Zhitkov, who worked as a lead designer at Google Chrome and held senior positions at Dropbox and Figma.
Jill Chase, partner at CapitalG, said that as a growth-stage fund, it’s very rare for her firm to invest in a pre-product company. “We will do this when two things are right: first, when the market opportunities are so massive and across generations,” she said. “The second criterion is that the team must be truly exceptional. This could not be clearer in this case.
The company expects the first version of its product to be available by early and mid-next year.
As for the business model for /dev/agents, Singleton said it probably wouldn’t be all that different from how Android monetizes its operating system now.
“You can imagine a lot of commerce happening on this platform,” he said. “We will either be able to take a share” of sales or charge users for subscriptions, he added.
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