Naïve Secures $28.5M Series A to Let AI Agents Automate Business Creation and Cut Operational Costs

Naïve raises $28.5M to automate the grunt work of setting up and running a company

Developers detest drudgery. The entire field of programming is proof of how hard people will work to automate away the boring tasks involved in building things. And, as vibe-coding has proved, they've even managed to find ways to not do most of the work in putting products together. So I wasn't very surprised to hear that Naïve, which offers infrastructure that lets AI agents take on the bulk of the work involved in running a business, had signed up over 30,000 developer customers within months of its launch. Taking vibe-coding a step further, the startup claims its infra can automate most of the work in setting up and running a business -- provided you supply the AI agents and the required token budget, of course. It packages the process of assembling payments, email accounts, phone numbers, cloud infrastructure, storage, and company incorporation behind a single API. Naïve supplies a prompt that developers can provide to tools like Cursor, Claude Code or Codex, which can connect to their APIs to provision the infrastructure to set up a business. It lets an agent orchestrate the formation of a U.S. LLC, supplying details such as the state, industry code, business description and proposed names, though users are still required to be involved to complete KYC/KYB processes and make any required payments. The rest of the set up can be done by AI, including setting up email inboxes, virtual cards, phone numbers, databases, computing resources and connections to services such as Stripe and QuickBooks. A governance layer promises to help users set budgets, restrict their agents' capabilities, and require human approval before sensitive actions are carried out. The company also provides templates for businesses, such as AI SEO, full-stack SaaS apps, recruiting, accounting, customer support, and even a mobile emulator with which agents can operate smartphone apps on emulated devices. The allure of such automation clearly resonated, as evidenced by the user figure mentioned above. And Naïve has scaled annual run-rate revenue by 10x to the low double-digit millions over the past six months, CEO and co-founder Sean Dorje said. Based on that traction, the company has now raised $28.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. Dorje told TechCrunch that his customers are using Naïve to run autonomous businesses such as AI automation agencies, "face-less" online content channels on TikTok and YouTube, and even a rental car agency. In one case, he discovered Naïve's infrastructure supporting a TikTok channel that posted AI-generated videos of cats and dogs dancing and boxing. "I think the one that's growing the fastest right now is AI automation agencies," Dorje said. "You know, the first business that a lot of people start is genuinely just selling agents to other small businesses [...] We have some customers who run an entire rental-car agency autonomously." But this toolkit for running businesses may only be part of Naïve's opportunity. Using AI to automate everything sounds great, but the cost of keeping agents running can grow astronomical as they call expensive AI models, pass large amounts of context between tasks, and consume resources while sitting idle. Naïve is using some of the new capital to develop infrastructure that it says can make those agent loops more efficient. It's building a model router to send queries to the most efficient model for a task while preserving and replaying already reasoned data; a memory system that stores and surfaces business context as needed by agents to do their tasks; and an orchestrator for dividing work among agents. Notably, Naïve is also building a serverless runtime that runs agents within lightweight JavaScript environments rather than assigning each one a complete virtual machine -- an approach that lets customers pay primarily when an agent is active and makes it less expensive to deploy large numbers of agents. While the autonomous company toolkit is in the most demand today, Dorje said optimizing inference costs is one of its fastest growing sources of demand. "Part of running an autonomous company and running agents, like that's your biggest cost line now, and so the highest growing demand right now, I would say is [for] inference and serverless agents," he said. He added that part of the business is getting interest from enterprises, though he did not name any. That could prove to be a more valuable business than helping founders automatically set up phone numbers and corporate cards. Developers may initially use Naïve to deal with the tedium of setting up a company, but as they grow, they may care more about whether it can meaningfully reduce the recurring cost of operating a horde of agents. Enterprises with established businesses may find something to care about on that front, too. Naïve currently has 10 full-time employees. Dorje said proceeds from the Series A will be used to hire researchers and develop the company's four infrastructure projects: virtualized sandboxes for agents; model routing and inference optimization; a memory layer; and governance and orchestration. Y Combinator, Zetta, Liquid 2 and angel investors including Gokul Rajaram, Apollo.io co-founder Tim Zheng, and former HubSpot COO JD Sherman also participated in the Series A. The funding brings the company's total capital raised to roughly $32 million.

Naïve bags $28.5M in funding to automate the creation and day-to-day running of almost any business

Palo Alto-based Naïve Inc., an artificial intelligence lab that's developing autonomous agents capable of setting up and running entire businesses, said today it has closed on a $28.5 million Series A round of funding. Nexus Venture Partners led the round, which saw participation from Y Combinator, Zetta, Liquid 2 and a host of angel investors. The startup is all about automation, noting that AI tools that can lighten people's workloads have proven to be especially popular with people such as developers, enabling them to avoid repetitive and tedious tasks. Now it wants to advance this and use AI automation to perform basically all of the work that's required to get an established business up and running. It's an enticing concept, and so far Naïve has already attracted more than 30,000 developer customers to its platform. Naïve goes further than traditional vibe coding. It has developed the infrastructure for AI agents to automate all of the steps required to establish a company and then run it on a day-to-day basis, so long as the customer provides the actual agents and the token budget. Essentially, it packages together the process of creating payments infrastructure, email accounts, phone numbers, cloud infrastructure, storage and business incorporation, making it all available through a simple application programming interface. The company supplies a set of prompts that developers can use with third-party agentic tools such as Claude Code, Codex and Cursor. When prompted, these agents will connect to Naïve's API to provision all of the infrastructure and other things needed to establish a company. For instance, it can tell agents how to orchestrate the creation of a U.S.-based limited liability company, providing details such as the state it's based in, a business description, industry code and a proposed name. However, the owner of the business must still perform the Know Your Customer and Know Your Business processes themselves and make any payments that are required. But just about everything else can be automated by AI agents. This includes tasks such as setting up email inboxes, phone numbers, databases, compute resources and links to payment processors like Stripe and accounting platforms like QuickBooks. Naïve has also built a comprehensive governance layer that can be used to restrict the capabilities of user's AI agents, establish budgets and decide which actions require human approval before they're taken by the agents. In addition, there are templates for things such as AI SEO, full-stack software-as-a-service applications, customer support, recruiting and accounting. It even has a mobile emulator that can be used by AI agents to navigate smartphone apps on virtual devices. Naïve says it has enjoyed impressive revenue growth, with sales increasing more than tenfold over the last six months, achieving an annual revenue run-rate in the low double-digit millions. Customers have used its agentic infrastructure to create and run a range of autonomous businesses, including content channels on apps such as TikTok and YouTube, car rental firms that are fully managed by AI agents and more. However, Naïve believes that while this toolkit is extremely useful to entrepreneurs, it has an even bigger opportunity in terms of reducing the costs associated with AI automation. That's important, because while an almost fully-automated business might sound great to the person that owns it, the cost of running those agents can escalate dramatically as they make hundreds of calls to expensive models, pass around large volumes of context and eat up resources while sitting idle. That's why Naïve is also looking for ways to improve the efficiency of AI agents. Its innovations include a model router that instructs agents to always choose the most cost-effective AI model for each task and a memory system that allows them to store and reuse business context. It has also built a serverless runtime environment that allows agents to run in lightweight JavaScript environments, further reducing costs. In this way, it says it can help to slash the operational expenses of automated businesses. Co-founder and Chief Executive Sean Dorje said this kind of optimization is vital because agent spending is likely to grow to trillions of dollars in future as more companies embrace automation. "Our vision at Naïve is to make each token do more, so autonomous companies can become a cost-efficient reality," he said. Ultimately, this could turn out to be a much more valuable business for Naïve than simply helping company founders automate the grunt work of setting up a new company. The platform will certainly be useful in getting a business up and running, but once that's done, most entrepreneurs will hope to expand and grow that business for years to come. If Naïve can significantly reduce the cost of running the hordes of agents that automate their businesses, those customers will likely want to keep using its platform for as long as their companies are around. Abishek Sharma of Nexus Venture Partners said autonomous software has already become an established fact, and the next step is to have fully autonomous companies. "Naïve gives millions of entrepreneurs and small businesses worldwide the turnkey infrastructure needed to build and run autonomous companies without needing to become AI experts," he said.