What the business is
/dev/agents is building a cloud-based operating system for AI agents that works across devices.
Starting capital
$56M seed round (November 2024)
How it started
David Singleton (Stripe CTO before that; led Android Wear at Google), Hugo Barra (VP of Android product management at Google, then Meta's Oculus VR), Ficus Kirkpatrick (early Android engineer, ex-Meta AR/VR VP) and Nicholas Jitkoff (principal designer on Google Chrome, senior roles at Dropbox and Figma) founded /dev/agents. Singleton's framing: before Android, everyone could see mobile's promise but 'it was just too hard to build anything on mobile' — and AI in 2024 was the same.
What happened
Index Ventures led the $56M seed, co-led by Alphabet's independent growth fund CapitalG, with Conviction Capital participating alongside angels including OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, Scale AI CEO Alexandr Wang, Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora and Android founder Andy Rubin. The deal valued the pre-product company at $500M. CapitalG partner Jill Chase said her growth fund almost never invests pre-product, and does so only for a generational market and a truly exceptional team — 'that could not be more clear in this instance'.
What has to be true
The round priced a team, not a product: $500M pre-product on the strength of the Android and Stripe track records.
The thesis positions the platform layer — not the agents themselves — as the durable position, echoing mobile-history logic.
Alphabet's independent growth fund co-led the round, a signal of how open — and how valuable — the agent-platform question still is.
What can be applied
A platform bet is credible when the founders have run the same play: the Android team claiming 'AI needs its Android' gets funded pre-product at $500M.
Aftermath
As of November 28, 2024, the first version of the product was expected early-to-mid 2025, with monetization likely via a take rate on platform commerce or subscriptions.
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