/dev/agents: Former Tech Executives Raise $56M to Build AI Agent Operating System

Former Google, Stripe executives raise $56 million for AI agent startup

A group of former Google and Stripe executives who helped build the Android platform have raised $56 million for a new company focused on developing an operating system for artificial intelligence agents. The San Francisco-based company, called /dev/agents, is set to come out of stealth mode on Tuesday and announce that it's raised a large seed round led by Index Ventures and co-led by Alphabet's growth investment fund, CapitalG. Dozens of angel investors also participated in the round, including high-profile figures such as Scale AI Chief Executive Officer Alexandr Wang, Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy. The fundraising round values /dev/agents at $500 million, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to disclose the figure publicly. A growing number of tech companies, including Microsoft, Anthropic and OpenAI, are building so-called AI agents that can perform tasks such as booking a flight or writing code with minimal human input. The goal is for these tools to boost productivity and get people to interact with AI more like they would an actual colleague or assistant. But the founders of /dev/agents think there's a key piece missing. If AI agents might one day be as ubiquitous as apps, developers will need a common technical framework to connect those services and allow them to communicate with each other -- similar to Apple's iOS or Google's Android. "We need an Android-like moment for AI," David Singleton, co-founder and CEO of /dev/agents, said in an interview. Singleton was formerly the chief technology officer at fintech firm Stripe and before that VP of engineering on Google's Android product. "We can see the promise of AI agents, but as a developer, it's just too hard to build anything good." To tackle that, /dev/agents plans to build a cloud-based operating system that can work across phones, laptops, and even cars. The company also wants to create a new user interface for people to interact more naturally with agents on a range of hardware devices. Singleton and his three other co-founders all have backgrounds developing operating systems. Hugo Barra, the startup's chief product officer, was previously a VP of product management for Android at Google and a VP of Oculus at Meta. Chief Technology Officer Ficus Kirkpatrick formerly worked on Android as an early engineer and as a vice president of augmented and virtual reality at Meta. And Chief Design Officer Nicholas Jitkoff was formerly a leading designer for Google Chrome OS and an executive at Dropbox. "This is a team that's built the last three generations of operating systems," Barra said, referencing the group's work on Android, wearables and AR/VR. For Nina Achadjian, a partner at Index Ventures who has known Singleton since his time at Google, the founders' background was central to the decision to invest. "If you think about the people at this company and founder-market fit -- it couldn't be more relevant to what they've set out to go build," she said. In addition to the four founders, /dev/agents has two other staffers. Singleton said the company plans to keep operations relatively nimble, similar to the early days of Android. One major area the company does plan to invest in is computing inference, which is needed to build an operating system running AI agents. "This is a once-in-a-generation opportunity that they're attacking," said Jill Chase, a partner at CapitalG. Chase said she had been specifically looking to invest in a company that was building an operating system for agents for over a year.

Former Google, Stripe Executives Raise $56 Million for AI Agent Startup

A group of former Google and Stripe executives who helped build the Android platform have raised $56 million for a new company focused on developing an operating system for artificial intelligence agents. The San Francisco-based company, called /dev/agents, is set to come out of stealth mode on Tuesday and announce that it's raised a large seed round led by Index Ventures and co-led by Alphabet Inc.'s growth investment fund, CapitalG. Dozens of angel investors also participated in the round, including high-profile figures such as Scale AI Chief Executive Officer Alexandr Wang, Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy. The fundraising round values /dev/agents at $500 million, according to a person familiar with the matter who was not authorized to disclose the figure publicly. A growing number of tech companies, including Microsoft Corp., Anthropic and OpenAI, are building so-called AI agents that can perform tasks such as booking a flight or writing code with minimal human input. The goal is for these tools to boost productivity and get people to interact with AI more like they would an actual colleague or assistant. But the founders of /dev/agents think there's a key piece missing. If AI agents might one day be as ubiquitous as apps, developers will need a common technical framework to connect those services and allow them to communicate with each other -- similar to Apple's iOS or Google's Android. "We need an Android-like moment for AI," David Singleton, co-founder and CEO of /dev/agents, said in an interview. Singleton was formerly the chief technology officer at fintech firm Stripe and before that VP of engineering on Google's Android product. "We can see the promise of AI agents, but as a developer, it's just too hard to build anything good." To tackle that, /dev/agents plans to build a cloud-based operating system that can work across phones, laptops, and even cars. The company also wants to create a new user interface for people to interact more naturally with agents on a range of hardware devices. Singleton and his three other co-founders all have backgrounds developing operating systems. Hugo Barra, the startup's chief product officer, was previously a VP of product management for Android at Google and a VP of Oculus at Meta. Chief Technology Officer Ficus Kirkpatrick formerly worked on Android as an early engineer and as a vice president of augmented and virtual reality at Meta. And Chief Design Officer Nicholas Jitkoff was formerly a leading designer for Google Chrome OS and an executive at Dropbox. "This is a team that's built the last three generations of operating systems," Barra said, referencing the group's work on Android, wearables and AR/VR. For Nina Achadjian, a partner at Index Ventures who has known Singleton since his time at Google, the founders' background was central to the decision to invest. "If you think about the people at this company and founder-market fit -- it couldn't be more relevant to what they've set out to go build," she said. In addition to the four founders, /dev/agents has two other staffers. Singleton said the company plans to keep operations relatively nimble, similar to the early days of Android. One major area the company does plan to invest in is computing inference, which is needed to build an operating system running AI agents.

New startup named /dev/agents led by Ex-Google, Meta tech leaders raises $56M for AI agents - SiliconANGLE

New startup named /dev/agents led by Ex-Google, Meta tech leaders raises $56M for AI agents A new artificial intelligence startup co-founded by former Google, Stripe and Meta executives named /dev/agents today announced it raised $56 million in seed funding to build what it calls an operating system for AI agents. The funding was led by Index Ventures and co-led by CapitalG, Alphabet Inc.'s independent growth fund. Sarah Guo at Conviction Partners also participated in the round alongside angel investors including Scale AI Chief Executive Alexandr Wang, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy and Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora. David Singleton, co-founder and chief executive of /dev/agents, was formerly the chief technology officer of Stripe Inc. and before that the vice president of engineering for Google's Android. He brought on co-founders who also worked on operating systems with the belief that what the AI industry lacks for mainstream adoption is a foundation for developers to build on. The company's co-founders include Hugo Barra, the company's chief product officer, former VP of Oculus at Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Technology Officer Ficus Kirkpatrick who also previously worked on Android as an engineer and at Meta as the VP of augmented and virtual reality. Nicholas Jitkoff, the company's chief design officer, formerly worked for Google on Chrome OS. "Today you can build an AI demo in hours, but getting something consumers can actually trust with their credit card is nearly impossible," said Singleton. "Just as Android made mobile development accessible to virtually any developer, we're building the platform that will help make AI agents mainstream." AI agents are an advanced evolution of current large language models that are designed to process information and execute tasks without human intervention. They do more than simply answer questions and summarize documents like chatbots but also integrate tool-using capabilities so that they can operate autonomously using human-like reasoning to make decisions. For example, they can send emails, write and send tweets, prepare and send reports based on events and more. Agents can catch errors in computer code fix them without intervention and flag the changes for human review. They also can work behind the scenes to adjust compute or storage resources so to avoid crashes or overloads by predicting spikes or overages based on historical data. According to Singleton and his cohort, modern AI is changing how people use everyday software. Agentic AI can for the first time allow computers to be teammates with people the same way that people are teammates with people. This is a fundamental shift in the way computers and software have been used as tools. "But it won't happen without removing a ton of blockers. We need new UI patterns, a reimagined privacy model, and a developer platform that makes it radically simpler to build useful agents," said Singleton. "That's the challenge we're taking on." To address this challenge, Singleton said that the company intends to build a cloud-based operating system for trusted AI agents that can run across any device. To make this happen, developers will need a platform to build on, similar to the way that Android forms a framework that applications can be built for mobile devices, tablets, laptops, TVs and other devices. According to /dev/agent, the current pattern for building AI apps and AI agents happens across a fragmented landscape of different operating systems and setups and this is stalling adoption. To realize the vision of bringing AI agents into the hands of more people means rethinking software by bringing new developer tools, creating new user interface patterns and reimagining app design around AI agents themselves.

AI agent startup /dev/agents has raised a massive $56M seed round at a $500M valuation | TechCrunch

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 jobs, such as booking and paying for flights, hotels, and excursions. /dev/agents, a new company started 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 just too hard 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 just really hard to build anything good." Prior to launching /dev/agents, Singleton was the CTO of Stripe, and before that, he led AndroidWear at Google. With /dev/agents, he argues that developers currently don't have standard tools and systems on top of which to build AI agents, and hopes to fill that gap by creating a unified platform that can be the operating system of the AI world. The company says its cloud-based operating system will work across devices, and using generative AI, will present 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, /dev/agents' investors might agree. This week, the company said it has raised a $56 million seed round co-led by Index Ventures and Alphabet's independent growth fund, CapitalG, with participation from Conviction Capital, a venture firm founded by Sarah Guo. A number of prominent tech leaders, including OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathi, Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang, Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, and Android founder Andy Rubin also participated in the round. Rubin will also serve as an advisor to the company. The deal valued the company at $500 million, according to a person with knowledge of the investment. Many investors are convinced that fully-functional AI agents are coming soon, but they still admit that the technical infrastructure for that future isn't available yet. And although a number of companies are developing different parts of the AI agent framework, /dev/agents' backers 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 that she jumped at the opportunity to back /dev/agents. "It's a super 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 the team." In addition to Singleton, /dev/agents was co-founded by Hugo Barra (CPO), who was previously VP of Android's product management at Google and led Meta's Oculus VR division. The company's two other co-founders include Ficus Kirkpatrick (CTO), an early Android engineer and a former VP of AR/VR at Meta; and Nicholas Jitkoff, who worked as a principal designer on Google Chrome and held senior roles at Dropbox and Figma. Jill Chase, a partner at CapitalG, said that as a growth-stage fund, it is exceedingly rare for her firm to invest in a pre-product company. "We will do it when two things are true: first, when the market opportunity is so massive and generational," she said. "The second criterion is the team has to be truly exceptional. That could not be more clear in this instance." The company expects to have the first version of its product available by early-to-mid next year. As for /dev/agents' business model, Singleton said it likely won't be too different from how Android is monetizing its operating system now. "You can imagine a lot of commerce happening on this platform," he said. "We would be able to either take a cut" of sales or charge users for subscriptions, he added.

Former Google executives plan to build an online operating system for AI agents

A hot potato: Autonomous agents that can act and make decisions by themselves are the latest trend in today's ever-growing AI hype cycle. Many companies are working on complex, hallucination-prone AI agents, but a new venture is apparently trying to go much further. Hugo Barra, David Singleton, and other former Android "leaders" have just unveiled /dev/agents, a new start-up focused on agentic AI technology. The company wants to create what is likely the first operating system for AI agents, a common framework capable of bringing different AI services and communication means under one roof. Barra was Android's public face from 2008 to 2013, when he acted as Google representative during the annual developer-focused I/O conferences. In his official X announcement, the executive said that the new company he founded will go back to Android's roots, which means the focus will be building a new operating system essentially from scratch. Singleton, who is the company's co-founder, was Android's VP of engineering before working as chief technology officer at fintech company Stripe. He told Bloomberg that current AI technology needs an Android-like moment. "We can see the promise of AI agents, but as a developer, it's just too hard to build anything good," he said. Nvidia explains that agentic AI should be considered as the next (wild?) frontier of artificial intelligence development. Agentic AI systems can use complex reasoning and iterative planning algorithms to solve complex problems all by themselves. The user, or the end customer, provides an AI agent with some initial instructions in prompt form, and the algorithms will magically solve all their problems for good. According to /dev/agents' founders, AI agents can flourish if they are hosted in a common, cloud-based operating system. This hypothetical internet OS would work across different devices, Singleton said, providing users with a new UI paradigm to interact with complex agentic AI tech on smartphones, computers, automotive platforms, and more. The newly announced start-up has already acquired the initial funds ($56 million) needed to start working on the new OS project. Barra said that /dev/agents will hire people interested in building things at the intersection of consumer and developer tech. Engineers who worked on three different generations of operating systems (Android, wearable gadgets, augmented reality) will join the plan. Bloomberg's report stated that the new team is also welcoming Ficus Kirkpatrick, an early Android engineer, and ChromeOS designer Nicholas Jitkoff, as chief technology officer and chief design officer, respectively.

Ex-Google employees say we need 'an Android-like moment for AI'

Hugo Barra, Google's former VP of Android product management, announced Wednesday that he is leading a new startup with aims to develop an Android-like operating system for AI agents. "[We're] going back to our Android roots, building a new operating system for people & AI agents," Barra wrote in a post on X. Recommended Videos I'm starting a new company with some of the best people I've ever worked with, and could not be more pumped. We're calling it /dev/agents. Going back to our Android roots, building a new operating system for people & AI agents. Check out @dps's post below for more. We're... https://t.co/QSIZLXJqZl — Hugo Barra (@hbarra) November 26, 2024 The company, called "/dev/agents," is working to develop a cloud-based "next-gen operating system for AI agents" that will "work with users across all of their devices," company co-founder and CEO David Singleton wrote in a post on X. He argues that AI agents will "need new UI patterns, a reimagined privacy model, and a developer platform that makes it radically simpler to build useful agents." As the current generation of large language models like GPT-4o, Llama 3.1, and Gemini 1.5 face diminishing performance returns despite developers pouring more and more amounts of training data, compute power and resources into them, AI agents are increasingly seen as the next major advancement in generative AI technology. These agents, unlike traditional apps, are designed to autonomously process information, make decisions, and perform specific actions on their user's behalf. That could be anything from generating complex computer code to booking flights and hotel accommodations, to transcribing business meetings then generating actionable tasks based on what was discussed. Here's how the new company's website describes its mission: "Modern AI will fundamentally change how people use software in their daily lives. Agentic applications could, for the first time, enable computers to work with people in much the same way people work with people. But it won't happen without removing a ton of blockers. We need new UI patterns, a reimagined privacy model, and a developer platform that makes it radically simpler to build useful agents. That's the challenge we're taking on." The industry's leading companies are already racing to deploy their own branded agents. Microsoft recently announced that it will incorporate agents into its 365 Copilot ecosystem in early 2025. Google's Project Jarvis, which is expected to arrive with the next Gemini update, leverages the AI's capabilities to execute common tasks, such as visiting websites and filling out online forms, at the user's command. OpenAI's agent, code named Operator, will function in much the same way when it is releases in January as a research preview through the company's developer API. Anthropic has already released its agent, dubbed Computer Control, which empowers Claude to emulate the keyboard presses and mouse clicks of a human user. "We can see the promise of AI agents, but as a developer, it's just too hard to build anything good," Singleton told Bloomberg, noting that the industry needs "an Android-like moment for AI."

Ex-Stripe CTO and former Meta and Google VPs launch AI agent-focused start-up

The team is currently focused on building the next generation of operating systems for AI agents. The former CTO at Stripe, David Singleton and former VPs for Google and Meta, Hugo Barra, Ficus Kirkpatrick and Nicholas Jitkoff, have launched /dev/agents, a new start-up that develops operating systems for AI agents, after a seed funding round that exceeded $50m. The start-up, which is headquartered in San Francisco, US, is focused on ensuring computers can work with people in much the same way people work with people and to do that, the platform will work on new UI patterns, a reimagined privacy model and a developer platform that makes it significantly easier to build AI agents. The funding round was led by Nina Achadjian at Index Ventures and co-led by Jill Chase at Alphabets's independent growth fund CapitalG. There were also a number of angel investors from prominent organisations, such as the co-founder of OpenAI, Andrej Karpathy, the CEO of Scale, AI Alexandr Wang and the CEO of Palo Alto Networks, Nikesh Arora. "We're about to see a huge shift in the way we interact with technology", said Achadjian. "An agentic future, where software works as intelligently and collaboratively as humans, could reshape our daily lives. It's a major undertaking, but also a massive opportunity. With their technical skill and experience, I can't think of a better team to execute on it than David and his co-founders at /dev/agents". Chase also expressed her excitement for the future, stating that the team has a significant challenge ahead of them and are well positioned to impact the next phase of OS development. She said, "I spent well over a year searching for a company building an OS for agents. This is a massively hard technical challenge only solvable by a once-in-a-generation team like this. David, Hugo, Ficus and Nicholas's trailblazing work on pivotal platforms like Android uniquely qualifies them to unlock the power of AI agents for developers. As longtime investors in Stripe, we've seen David's unique technical and leadership genius up close, as well as that of Hugo, Ficus and Nicholas through our affiliation with Alphabet. I'm thrilled to support /dev/agents as David, Hugo, Ficus and Nicholas once again build a reliable foundation for a new era of computing". Singleton announced he would be stepping down from his role as the CTO of Stripe in August of this year and has since been replaced by the former deputy technology chief, Rahul Patil, who previously worked for Oracle, AWS and Microsoft. Don't miss out on the knowledge you need to succeed. Sign up for the Daily Brief, Silicon Republic's digest of need-to-know sci-tech news.

Google Vets Raise $56 Million to Give AI Its 'Android-Like Moment' | PYMNTS.com

A group of tech veterans have reportedly raised $56 million to help construct an operating system for artificial intelligence (AI) agents. As Bloomberg News reported Tuesday (Nov. 26), the new company -- dubbed /dev/agents -- is led by former Google and Stripe employees who worked on the Android operating system. Their new seed funding round values /dev/agents at $500 million, the report added, citing a source familiar with the matter. The report noted that several companies, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic among them, are creating AI agents. For example, Microsoft has recently debuted tools to help healthcare organizations build customized AI agents for appointment scheduling, clinical trial matching, and patient triage. OpenAI's new framework, Swarm, lets AI agents collaborate and independently execute complex tasks, potentially boosting business efficiency. "While still experimental, the technology is poised to revolutionize workflows by enabling agents to autonomously handle processes like marketing and sales," PYMNTS wrote last month. However, the founders of /dev/agents think there's a key component missing. If AI agents become as ever-present as apps, developers will need a common technical framework to connect those services and allow them to communicate with each other -- similar to Apple's iOS or Google's Android. "We need an Android-like moment for AI," David Singleton, co-founder and CEO of /dev/agents, said in an interview with Bloomberg. Singleton was the vice president of engineering on the Android project before becoming chief technology officer at FinTech company Stripe. "We can see the promise of AI agents, but as a developer, it's just too hard to build anything good," he added. Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote earlier this month about tools such as the AI agent offered by Commerce.AI, exemplifying the trend of AI systems being trusted to handle sensitive customer interactions and operational decisions that guide company performance. "While traditional AI approaches have centered around assistance, the ability for AI agents to reason, decide and take action will amplify results," Archana Kannan, senior vice president of product for work messaging app Slack, told PYMNTS. "Ultimately, agents are going to transform how every user gets their job done, particularly the mundane, common tasks like automating projects, new hire onboarding, generating content or managing IT incidents."

Former Android leaders are building an 'operating system for AI agents'

The company is working on a cloud-based "next-gen operating system for AI agents" intended "for trusted agents to work with users across all of their devices," Singleton wrote in a post on X. He said that AI agents will "need new UI patterns, a reimagined privacy model, and a developer platform that makes it radically simpler to build useful agents." Barra, who is serving as /dev/agents' chief product officer, was a big public face for Android at Google, having managed the project during the early teens. He later worked for Xiaomi and then as the leader of Facebook's Oculus VR team. Bloomberg notes that he and Singleton are joined at /dev/agents by CTO Ficus Kirkpatrick, an early Android engineer who was a VP of AR and VR at Meta, and chief design officer Nicholas Jitkoff, who worked on ChromeOS design.