• by Laurie Sullivan , November 26, 2024

A San Francisco-based company is expected to announce Tuesday that it has raised a large funding seed round led by Index Ventures and co-led by CapitalG, Alphabet’s growth investment fund.

The company is called /dev/agents, which likely refers to an AI agent that takes charge of a team portfolio to help win work.

Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, OpenAI and Meta, among others, are building AI agents to perform a variety of tasks and boost productivity. They can be written to do everything, from writing code and keeping notes to making restaurant reservations.

The goal is to get these AI agents to interact with people, which means building a cloud-based operating system for trusted agents to work with users across all their devices.

These types of agents are not only for customer-facing or internal applications to support efficiencies and services. Advertisers also could use these AI agents to support and automate media buying, personalize advertising, tailor messages, and perform dynamic creative optimization.

David Singleton, co-founder and CEO of /dev/agents, made the announcement on LinkedIn, but also told Bloomberg in an interview that the industry needs an "Android-like moment for AI.”

"I’m building the next-gen operating system for AI agents, joining my former colleagues Hugo Barra, Nicholas Jitkoff, and Ficus Kirkpatrick as co-founders," Singleton wrote in the LinkedIn post. 

Singleton formerly served as the chief technology officer at fintech firm Stripe and prior to that was vice president of engineering on Google’s Android product. Stripe processes credit card charges, as well as other payment methods such as debit cards, wallets, and cash-based vouchers. 

The fundraising round is valued at $500 million, Bloomberg reported, citing a person familiar with the deal.

“Modern AI will fundamentally change how people use software in their daily lives,” Singleton wrote in the post. “Agentic applications could, for the first time, enable computers to work with people in much the same way people work with people.”

The startup is taking on a major challenge. Singleton said it will require removing a huge amount of blockers, developing new UI patterns, reimagining privacy models, and developing a platform that makes it simpler to build useful agents.

Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff also believes in the future of AI autonomous agents. He has said many times that his company supports pre-built and customizable agents to automate customer service tasks.