.png)
November 27, 2024
The AI startup /dev/agents has raised $56 million in its seed funding round. The company's goal is to develop an operating system for AI agents, which is intended to form the basis for a new generation of AI applications. The funding was led by Index Ventures, with Co-Lead being CapitalG, the independent growth fund of Alphabet Inc. Other participants included Conviction Partners as well as prominent angel investors such as Alexandr Wang (CEO of Scale AI), Andrej Karpathy (Co-founder of OpenAI), and Nikesh Arora (CEO of Palo Alto Networks).
Behind /dev/agents is a team of experienced leaders from the tech industry. David Singleton, CEO and Co-founder, was previously CTO at Stripe and before that Vice President of Engineering for Google's Android. Other co-founders include Hugo Barra (former Vice President of Oculus at Meta and previously at Google), Ficus Kirkpatrick (former Vice President for AR/VR at Meta and also with Android experience), and Nicholas Jitkoff (former designer for Google Chrome OS). They are all united by the conviction that the AI industry lacks a solid foundation for developers to achieve widespread success.
“Today you can build an AI demo in a few hours, but developing an application that consumers will trust with their credit card details is nearly impossible,” says Singleton. /dev/agents wants to overcome this hurdle by creating a platform that simplifies the development of trustworthy and useful AI agents. Similar to how Android made mobile development accessible to a wide range of developers, /dev/agents' operating system is intended to pave the way for the mass adoption of AI agents.
AI agents represent a further development of the current large language models. They can not only answer questions and summarize texts, but also perform tasks independently. Thanks to their ability to use tools and make human-like decisions, they can, for example, send emails, compose tweets, create reports, and much more. They can detect and correct errors in computer code or adjust computing and memory resources in the background to prevent crashes and overloads.
According to Singleton, modern AI is changing the way people use software. AI agents allow computers, for the first time, to collaborate with humans as team members. This represents a fundamental shift in the relationship between humans and computers.
To address the challenges in developing AI agents, /dev/agents is planning a cloud-based operating system that can run on any device. This will provide developers with a platform on which they can create applications for AI agents, similar to how Android provides a framework for mobile devices, tablets, laptops, and other devices.
The current development of AI apps and agents takes place in a fragmented landscape of different operating systems and setups. This inhibits distribution and adoption. /dev/agents wants to change this by providing new developer tools, creating new user interface patterns, and rethinking app design around AI agents.
“We are on the cusp of a tremendous shift in the way we interact with technology,” says Nina Achadjian, Partner at Index Ventures. “A future where software works as intelligently and collaboratively as humans could fundamentally change our everyday lives. It’s a big undertaking, but also a huge opportunity.”
