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Developers detest drudgery. The entire field of programming is proof of how hard people will work to automate away the boring tasks involved in building things. And, as vibe-coding has proved, they\u2019ve even managed to find ways to not<\/em> do most of the work in putting products together.<\/p>\n So I wasn\u2019t very surprised to hear that Na\u00efve<\/a>, which offers infrastructure that lets AI agents take on the bulk of the work involved in running a business, had signed up over 30,000 developer customers within months of its launch.<\/p>\n Taking vibe-coding a step further, the startup claims its infra can automate most of the work in setting up and running a business \u2014 provided you supply the AI agents and the required token budget, of course. It packages the process of assembling payments, email accounts, phone numbers, cloud infrastructure, storage, and company incorporation behind a single API. <\/p>\n Na\u00efve supplies a prompt that developers can provide to tools like Cursor, Claude Code or Codex, which can connect to their APIs to provision the infrastructure to set up a business. It lets an agent orchestrate the formation of a U.S. LLC, supplying details such as the state, industry code, business description and proposed names, though users are still required to be involved to complete KYC\/KYB processes and make any required payments.<\/p>\n The rest of the set up can be done by AI, including setting up email inboxes, virtual cards, phone numbers, databases, computing resources and connections to services such as Stripe and QuickBooks. A governance layer promises to help users set budgets, restrict their agents\u2019 capabilities, and require human approval before sensitive actions are carried out. The company also provides templates for businesses, such as AI SEO, full-stack SaaS apps, recruiting, accounting, customer support, and even a mobile emulator with which agents can operate smartphone apps on emulated devices.<\/p>\n The allure of such automation clearly resonated, as evidenced by the user figure mentioned above. And Na\u00efve has scaled annual run-rate revenue by 10x to the low double-digit millions over the past six months, CEO and co-founder Sean Dorje said. <\/p>\n Based on that traction, the company has now raised $28.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners, TechCrunch has exclusively learned.<\/p>\n Dorje told TechCrunch that his customers are using Na\u00efve to run autonomous businesses such as AI automation agencies, \u201cface-less\u201d online content channels on TikTok and YouTube, and even a rental car agency. In one case, he discovered Na\u00efve\u2019s infrastructure supporting a TikTok channel that posted AI-generated videos of cats and dogs dancing and boxing.<\/p>\n \u201cI think the one that\u2019s growing the fastest right now is AI automation agencies,\u201d Dorje said. \u201cYou know, the first business that a lot of people start is genuinely just selling agents to other small businesses [\u2026] We have some customers who run an entire rental-car agency autonomously.\u201d <\/p>\n But this toolkit for running businesses may only be part of Na\u00efve\u2019s opportunity. Using AI to automate everything sounds great, but the cost of keeping agents running can grow astronomical as they call expensive AI models, pass large amounts of context between tasks, and consume resources while sitting idle. <\/p>\n Na\u00efve is using some of the new capital to develop infrastructure that it says can make those agent loops more efficient. It\u2019s building a model router to send queries to the most efficient model for a task while preserving and replaying already reasoned data; a memory system that stores and surfaces business context as needed by agents to do their tasks; and an orchestrator for dividing work among agents. <\/p>\n Notably, Na\u00efve is also building a serverless runtime that runs agents within lightweight JavaScript environments rather than assigning each one a complete virtual machine \u2014 an approach that lets customers pay primarily when an agent is active and makes it less expensive to deploy large numbers of agents. <\/p>\n While the autonomous company toolkit is in the most demand today, Dorje said optimizing inference costs is one of its fastest growing sources of demand. \u201cPart of running an autonomous company and running agents, like that\u2019s your biggest cost line now, and so the highest growing demand right now, I would say is [for] inference and serverless agents,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n He added that part of the business is getting interest from enterprises, though he did not name any. <\/p>\n That could prove to be a more valuable business than helping founders automatically set up phone numbers and corporate cards. Developers may initially use Na\u00efve to deal with the tedium of setting up a company, but as they grow, they may care more about whether it can meaningfully reduce the recurring cost of operating a horde of agents. Enterprises with established businesses may find something to care about on that front, too.<\/p>\n Na\u00efve currently has 10 full-time employees. Dorje said proceeds from the Series A will be used to hire researchers and develop the company\u2019s four infrastructure projects: virtualized sandboxes for agents; model routing and inference optimization; a memory layer; and governance and orchestration. <\/p>\n Y Combinator, Zetta, Liquid 2 and angel investors including Gokul Rajaram, Apollo.io co-founder Tim Zheng, and former HubSpot COO JD Sherman also participated in the Series A. The funding brings the company\u2019s total capital raised to roughly $32 million.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n When you purchase through links in our articles, we may earn a small commission<\/a>. This doesn\u2019t affect our editorial independence.<\/em><\/p>\n