The archive · AI & Models · Strategic decision · 2023–2026
SuperAGI bets agentic AI is the next platform: $10M from Jan Koum's Newlands
Indian-founded SuperAGI bets LLMs can't act — only large agentic models can; a $10M Series A from Jan Koum's Newlands VC and 20,000 developers followed.
SuperAGI
What the business is
SuperAGI builds an AI-agent stack: an open-source autonomous-agent framework and large-agentic-model (LAM) infrastructure, plus paid apps — Contlo (marketing automation) and Verk (AI employees) — that businesses use to automate sales, marketing and support work.
Starting capital：$10M all-equity Series A (Mar 2024) led by Newlands VC, bringing total funding to ~$15M at a sub-$100M valuation; Kae Capital and AI researchers/operators from Meta and Apple also participated.
How it started
Ishaan Bhola and Mukunda NS, both former employees of Sachin Bansal's fintech Navi, started SuperAGI in early 2023 with a focus on agentic research. Their argument: ChatGPT-era LLMs create content but fail when asked to take action, so they built 'large agentic models' (LAMs) and open-sourced the framework. In March 2024, Newlands VC — the secretive firm bankrolled by WhatsApp co-founder Jan Koum — led a $10M Series A, with Kae Capital and AI researchers from Meta and Apple participating.
What happened
By March 2024, ~20,000 developers (including staff at Microsoft, Google, Tencent, Tesla, JP Morgan and OpenAI) were using its tools, and Contlo and Verk had 1,000+ paid customers, with 150+ apps built on the platform. It open-sourced SAM-7B and the VEagle vision model, collaborated with AutoGPT, Microsoft and OpenAI on agent standards, and in September 2024 published SuperCoder2.0 — an autonomous coding agent that resolved 34% of SWE-bench Lite, ranking fourth on the global leaderboard.
How it ended up
Still running as of 2026-09-02: the SuperAGI framework repo on GitHub remains live and under active development, and the company continues to operate its commercial agent platform after the 2024 round.
Background
SuperAGI, started in early 2023 by Ishaan Bhola and Mukunda NS — both ex-Navi — bet that the next AI platform is not chat but action: LLMs can generate content, they argued, but fail when asked to do work, so the company built 'large agentic models' (LAMs) and a full-stack AGI platform around them. It has a Bengaluru presence alongside its Palo Alto headquarters, and its first product, Contlo, was built for Indian D2C brands and Shopify merchants.
In March 2024, Jan Koum's secretive Newlands VC led a $10M Series A, bringing total funding to ~$15M at a sub-$100M valuation, with Kae Capital and AI researchers from Meta and Apple participating. By then ~20,000 developers — including staff at Microsoft, Google, Tencent, Tesla, JP Morgan and OpenAI — were using its tools, and Contlo and Verk (an 'AI employee' product) had 1,000+ paid customers, with 150+ apps built on the platform.
SuperAGI open-sourced its agent framework and small models (SAM-7B, VEagle), worked with AutoGPT, Microsoft and OpenAI on agent standards, and in September 2024 published SuperCoder2.0, an autonomous coding agent that resolved 34% of SWE-bench Lite and ranked fourth on the global leaderboard. As of 2026-09-02 the open-source framework remains live on GitHub and the company is still operating commercially — the bet on agents as the next platform is ongoing.
What has to be true
- It is an early, dated test of the agentic-AI thesis: a sub-$100M startup taking on the LLM labs by betting on action-taking models (LAMs).
- Traction is concrete: ~20,000 developers and 1,000+ paid customers as of 2024-03-11, plus a live open-source GitHub repo (checked 2026-09-02).
- The investor signal is unusual: Jan Koum's Newlands VC almost never discloses deals, making this round a notable exception.
- It shows an Indian-founded team using open source as distribution — winning developers first, monetizing through apps — instead of raising huge model-training rounds.
What can be applied
Open-sourcing the framework made a small startup visible to 20,000 developers and made its LAMs credible; the bet that developer gravity plus paid apps outflanks closed AI labs is still unproven.
Aftermath
As of 2026-09-02, SuperAGI is still operating: the SuperAGI open-source autonomous-agent framework repository on GitHub is live and under active development, and the company continues to run its commercial agent products (Contlo and Verk) after the March 2024 Series A. The company's stated strategy has not changed — keep the research, frameworks and models open source while generating revenue from applications — and its 2024 SuperCoder2.0 technical report remains the public proof of its LAM/coding-agent research.
Sources
- SuperAGI snags funding from WhatsApp founder Jan Koum's secretive Newlands VC
- TransformerOptimus/SuperAGI — dev-first open source autonomous AI agent framework
- SuperCoder2.0: Technical Report on Exploring the feasibility of LLMs as Autonomous Programmer
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