Many startups and huge tech corporations are constructing AI brokers or packages that may deal with multi-step duties with out person supervision. As soon as out there, these brokers might want to collaborate with one another to finish complicated jobs, comparable to reserving and paying for flights, motels, and excursions.
/dev/brokers, a brand new firm began by former Google executives who helped develop Android throughout the early days of the smartphone period, believes a brand new working system is required to completely understand the potential of AI brokers.
“Earlier than Android existed, we may all see the promise of cellular, however as a developer, it was simply too onerous to construct something on cellular,” stated David Singleton, the corporate’s co-founder and CEO (pictured above). “We’re seeing the identical factor once more. We are able to see the promise of AI, however as a developer, it’s simply actually onerous to construct something good.”
Previous to launching /dev/brokers, Singleton was the CTO of Stripe, and earlier than that, he led AndroidWear at Google. With /dev/brokers, he argues that builders presently don’t have commonplace instruments and programs on high of which to construct AI brokers, and hopes to fill that hole by making a unified platform that may be the working system of the AI world.
The corporate says its cloud-based working system will work throughout gadgets, and utilizing generative AI, will current customized person interfaces.
“What we’re attempting to do right here is just like what we did with Android,” Singleton stated.
If that sounds promising to you, /dev/brokers’ traders may agree.
This week, the corporate stated it has raised a $56 million seed spherical led by Index Ventures and co-led by Alphabet’s unbiased progress fund, CapitalG, with participation from Conviction Capital, a enterprise agency based by Sarah Guo. A lot of distinguished tech leaders, together with OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy, Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang, Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, and Android founder Andy Rubin additionally participated within the spherical.
The deal valued the corporate at $500 million, in response to an individual with information of the funding.
Many traders are satisfied that fully-functional AI brokers are coming quickly, however they nonetheless admit that the technical infrastructure for that future isn’t out there but. And though numerous corporations are creating completely different components of the AI agent framework, /dev/brokers’ backers imagine {that a} new, third-party working system might be the important thing to unlocking their full potential.
Nina Achadjian, a companion at Index Ventures, stated that she jumped on the alternative to again /dev/brokers.
“It’s an excellent troublesome technical drawback, and a extremely large concept,” Achadjian stated. “But when there was one group to do it, the group that constructed Android and Stripe from the bottom up can be the group.”
Along with Singleton, /dev/brokers was co-founded by Hugo Barra (CPO), who was beforehand VP of Android’s product administration at Google and led Meta’s Oculus VR division. The corporate’s two different co-founders embody Ficus Kirkpatrick (CTO), an early Android engineer and a former VP of AR/VR at Meta; and Nicholas Jitkoff, who labored as a principal designer on Google Chrome and held senior roles at Dropbox and Figma.
Jill Chase, a companion at CapitalG, stated that as a growth-stage fund, it’s exceedingly uncommon for her agency to put money into a pre-product firm. “We are going to do it when two issues are true: first, when the market alternative is so huge and generational,” she stated. “The second criterion is the group needs to be actually distinctive. That might not be extra clear on this occasion.”
The corporate expects to have the primary model of its product out there by early-to-mid subsequent 12 months.
As for /dev/brokers’ enterprise mannequin, Singleton stated it doubtless gained’t be too completely different from how Android is monetizing its working system now.
“You may think about loads of commerce taking place on this platform,” he stated. “We’d have the ability to both take a reduce” of gross sales or cost customers for subscriptions, he added.
