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.