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

A new artificial intelligence startup co-founded by former Google LLC, Stripe Inc. and Meta Platforms Inc. executives named /dev/agents today announced it has 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 that include Scale AI Chief Executive Alexandr Wang, OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy and Palo Alto Networks Inc. 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, a onetime Googler and former vice president of Oculus at Meta Platforms Inc. Chief Technology Officer Ficus Kirkpatrick who also previously worked on Android as an engineer and at Meta as vice president 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,” Singleton said. “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.”

To address this challenge, Singleton said, the company intends to build a cloud-based operating system for trusted AI agents that can run across any device. To make that 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.

“We’re about to see a huge shift in the way we interact with technology,” said Nina Achadjian, a partner at Index Ventures. “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.”

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