Skyfall AI plans to buy a company and let an AI CEO run it, aiming to double revenue in six months

This Startup Wants to Buy a Company Just to See What an AI CEO Does With It

Forget AI coding agents. One startup is now working on an AI CEO that it hopes could automate an entire business from end to end. Skyfall AI came out of stealth this week after spending the past year developing AI systems that are designed to make the long-term decisions typically handled by company executives. Now, the startup wants to put its technology to the test in the real world by buying a small SaaS or e-commerce business for up to $1 million and letting its AI run much of the company. "Skyfall builds AI agents that can run a company on their own, and we're proving it by buying software businesses to operate ourselves," the company's website reads. "If you've built a real product with paying customers and you're ready to hand it off, we want to hear from you." Forbes reports that the AI would oversee areas including pricing, marketing, customer support, finance and operations as it gradually reduces human involvement. The overall goal is to double the acquired company's revenue in just six months. Skyfall was founded by Sam Pasupalak, Kaheer Suleman, and Sumit Pasupalak. Sam Pasupalak and Suleman previously co-founded the deep learning startup Maluuba, which Microsoft acquired in 2017. With Skyfall, the founders are now trying to move beyond limitations they see in large language models like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini. "For the last 5 years, the foundational model market has relied on a single paradigm: scaling laws for LLMs - more data, more compute, bigger models," Sam Pasupalak wrote in a post on X. "However, the real world is messy and much more complicated. In order to achieve our long term vision, the next generation of AI models requires a different approach." To help test that theory, the company has developed a benchmark designed to measure how AI models adapt as business conditions change. According to Skyfall's research, current models performed well with simple tasks but struggled on more difficult ones where decisions had long-term consequences. Skyfall's proposed solution is what it calls "enterprise world models," AI systems that emphasize continual learning and world modelling. But before taking over an actual business, the company tested its tech on a video game. "Last year we started with the video game RollerCoaster Tycoon," Sam Pasupalak told Forbes. "Where you're essentially operating an entire theme park and trying to maximize revenue. The AI's success on it gave us confidence that we could operate inside a simulated business. The next step is buying a real-world company. After that, perhaps next year, we'll look at automating businesses worth tens of millions of dollars." Other companies have conducted smaller experiments involving AI-run businesses. Anthropic previously allowed its Claude model to run a vending machine, while researchers at Andon Labs put AI in charge of a coffee shop in Stockholm. Even Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly developing an AI agent to help him work faster. But none have gone as far as Skyfall. Ultimately, the startup's founders have pretty ambitious (and downright naive) dreams for their tech. Sam Pasupalak wrote on X that he and his team believe in a utopian future in which people are free to pursue their creative interests instead of spending their lives on mundane tasks. He argues that reaching that future will require automating the way companies operate. "We want to free humanity from all the monotonous boring operational tasks that they spend their daily lives doing," wrote Pasupalak.

Tech Bros Acquiring Entire Company So They Can Appoint an AI as Its CEO

Can't-miss innovations from the bleeding edge of science and tech A tech startup called Skyfall AI is set to do the most tech startup thing imaginable: toy with an unwitting group of employees' careers by turning their company into a giant AI experiment. First, the plan is to buy a small tech business, like an e-commerce or B2B SaaS company, for as much as $1 million. Then the shotcallers at Skyfall will appoint an AI as the CEO, put it in charge of running the entire operation, and dust off their hands while wishing the employees they just subjugated to an AI model all the best. Skyfall's human CEO and cofounder Sam Pasupalak frames this as key to realizing the company's mission to "democratize the power of a CEO to all the small businesses around the world." "If you want a truly autonomous business, you have to buy a business and operate the whole thing end to end," Pasupalak told Forbes in an interview. "Unless you run a business with minimal human intervention, you'll never know whether an autonomous enterprise is actually possible." Unlike many AI firms that're focused on building AI agents that perform specific workers' tasks, including sales and coding, Skyfall wants to set itself apart by pursuing a virtual CEO that can help with the big picture decision-making needed to run a company. The AI model will have plenty of responsibilities, like overseeing pricing, marketing, customer support, finance, and operations, according to Forbes. The goal? Gradually reduce human involvement, all while doubling the company's revenue. That's an ambitious goal. But the SkyFall guys are confident that their AI is ready for the real world after an unusual test: it excelled at the video game RollerCoaster Tycoon, a management sim where you oversee an amusement park. Good enough, right? "That gave us confidence that we could operate inside a simulated business. The next step is buying a real company," Pasupalak said. They're not prepared to let an AI completely run loose, though, stressing that even when AI hypothetically takes over a lot of a company's operations, humans should still provide accountability. "Trust is still important, and you probably don't want to relinquish actual responsibility to an AI," chief technology officer Kaheer Suleman told Forbes. "Humans should always remain responsible in some capacity." Skyfall is arguably realizing an idea some tech CEOs are already playing with. Meta's Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly training a "CEO AI agent" to help him do his job, as well as creating a virtual AI clone of the millennial founder so he can be omnipresent through the company. And Block's Jack Dorsey recently revealed his vision to create a management hierarchy in which everyone in his company reports to him through a central AI -- what he styled as the "intelligence layer." All those examples illustrate a disturbing trend: CEOs can tout AI's supposedly wondrous ability to streamline operations all they want, but it's clear the tech is being used to extend their authority over the rank and file. If they can't literally be everywhere at once, their all-seeing AI systems can. Skyfall's wouldn't be the first stunt involving AI running a business. Researchers at Andon Labs put a Google Gemini-powered AI model in charge of running an entire coffee shop in Stockholm, which proceeded to blow through most of its budget in a single month. The AI safety firm also let Anthropic's Claude run a vending machine, allowing it to set prices and choose what to stock. It quickly devolved into chaos after taking employee requests and splurging on bizarre items like tungsten cubes. Let's hope for the sake of the employees that Skyfall's experiment fares a little better. Or maybe not, if it paves the way to a world where AI runs everything. "We want all businesses to be run autonomously because we believe people should spend their time on things they're passionate about -- not operational tasks," Pasupalak told Forbes. "We want to build the autonomous era." More on AI: AI CEOs Facing Full-on Revolt From Employees

An AI Is About to Become a First-Time CEO | PYMNTS.com

Skyfall plans to acquire a small B2B SaaS or eCommerce business for up to $1 million and give its AI control over pricing, marketing, customer support, finance and operations, Forbes reported. Humans will retain only the legal and regulatory duties: signing acquisition documents, setting up banking and filing taxes. The AI will handle the rest. Skyfall is targeting a doubling of revenue within six months and plans to document the experiment publicly, including any failures. The AI CEO Has Been Tried Before, and It Fell Short "The job of a CEO is to make hundreds of decisions every week with thousands of data points available to you," Sam Pasupalak, Skyfall's co-founder and CEO, told Tech Startups. "To automate that, you need more than a chatbot. You need a comprehensive system that understands the fundamentals of a company: how marketing spend impacts sales, how HR shifts affect productivity, and how to plan across long horizons." Skyfall is backed by Fidelity, Inovia Capital, Touring Capital, M13, NextView Ventures and Garage Capital, according to Tech Startups, though the funding amount has not been disclosed. Skyfall calls its technology Enterprise World Models, AI systems designed to predict the future state of a business by simulating thousands of possible decisions and their downstream effects rather than generating text responses to individual prompts, the company said. The idea of an AI chief executive is not new. NetDragon Websoft, a Chinese gaming technology company, appointed an AI-powered virtual executive named Tang Yu as rotating CEO of its flagship subsidiary in August 2022, NetDragon announced. Spirits company Dictador appointed a humanoid robot named Mika as its experimental CEO the same year, Reuters reported. Both attracted significant press coverage but functioned as decision-support tools rather than autonomous operators; major decisions at both companies remained with human executives, Forbes noted. If the AI Doubles Revenue, Small Business Acquisition Economics Change The acquisition target is deliberately small. A business valued at up to $1 million carries real customers, real revenue and real vendor relationships without the regulatory and reputational exposure of a larger organization, IBTimes reported. If Skyfall's AI doubles revenue in six months, the model has implications beyond the experiment. A private equity firm or search fund that acquires small businesses and uses AI to manage them could reduce the management overhead that makes small acquisitions expensive to operate. The unit economics of buying a $1 million SaaS company change if the management layer costs software instead of salaries. Close to 7% of U.S. enterprise CFOs have already deployed AI agents in live finance workflows, with an additional 5% running pilots, PYMNTS Intelligence found. Those deployments cover structured, repeatable tasks with clear rules and measurable outcomes. Skyfall's experiment starts with the unstructured decisions: competitive strategy, customer retention and pricing calls that affect revenue over months. PYMNTS reported in its agentic enterprise analysis that higher-impact decisions involving money, customer trust and regulation will continue to require human oversight. Skyfall is skipping the structured tasks entirely. The company has not disclosed which business it intends to acquire or when the acquisition will close. For all PYMNTS AI coverage, subscribe to the daily AI Newsletter.