A new startup named “/dev/agents”, founded by former Android leaders, is focused on launching a cloud operating system for artificial intelligence agents.
Currently, the startup, based in San Francisco, has raised $56 million and plans to announce an initial funding round led by Index Ventures and Alphabet’s investment fund CapitalG, along with participation from a dozen angel investors
Business angels are wealthy individuals who invest money into a startup business, typically in exchange for convertible debt or ownership equity. — Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang, Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy. According to Bloomberg, the fundraising round values /dev/agents at $500 million.
More and more technology companies, including Microsoft, Anthropic, and OpenAI, are undertaking the creation of artificial intelligence agents — systems capable of performing everyday and work tasks, such as booking airline tickets or writing code with minimal human involvement.
According to the founders of /dev/agents, if artificial intelligence agents ever become as widespread as applications — a joint technical structure will be needed to connect these agents and allow them to interact with each other (similar to how apps work in Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android).
“We need a moment similar to Android for AI,” says David Singleton, co-founder and CEO of /dev/agents, who served as CTO at fintech firm Stripe, and prior to that was Vice President of Product Development for Android at Google.
The future operating system will work on phones, laptops, and even in cars. The startup also wants to create a new user interface so that people can interact with agents on various hardware devices “more naturally.”
Singleton, like his entire team, has extensive experience in developing operating systems: Hugo Barra, the startup’s product director, was previously Vice President of Product Management for Android at Google and Vice President of Oculus at Meta; Chief Technical Officer Ficus Kirkpatrick worked on Android as an early engineer and was later appointed Vice President of Augmented and Virtual Reality at Meta; Chief Designer Nicholas Jitkoff was previously the lead designer of the Google Chrome OS and head at Dropbox.
“This is a team that has created the last three generations of operating systems,” Barra said, referring to the group’s work on Android, wearable devices, and AR/VR.
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