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.