Naïve, a startup that provides infrastructure allowing AI agents to handle the bulk of business operations, has attracted over 30,000 developer customers within months of launching and has now raised $28.5 million in Series A funding led by Nexus Venture Partners, TechCrunch exclusively reported on August 6, 2026. The company's platform automates most tasks involved in establishing and operating a business, from forming a U.S. LLC to setting up payment systems, email accounts, phone numbers, and cloud infrastructure, all accessible through a single API. Developers supply AI agents and the necessary token budget, and Naïve's infrastructure handles the rest, packaging the entire process behind one interface.
The startup has scaled its annual run-rate revenue tenfold to the low double-digit millions over the past six months, according to CEO and co-founder Sean Dorje. Naïve supplies a prompt that developers can feed into tools like Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex, which then connect to the company's API to provision business infrastructure. The platform lets an agent orchestrate U.S. LLC formation by supplying details such as state, industry code, business description, and proposed names, though users must still complete KYC/KYB processes and handle required payments. AI agents can then set up email inboxes, virtual cards, phone numbers, databases, computing resources, and connections to services like Stripe and QuickBooks. The company offers templates for various business types, including AI SEO, full-stack SaaS apps, recruiting, accounting, customer support, and a mobile emulator that lets agents operate smartphone apps on emulated devices. A governance layer helps users establish budgets, limit agent capabilities, and require human approval before sensitive actions occur.
Dorje told TechCrunch that customers are using Naïve to run autonomous businesses including AI automation agencies, "face-less" online content channels on TikTok and YouTube, and even a rental car agency. "I think the one that's growing the fastest right now is AI automation agencies," Dorje said. "You know, the first business that a lot of people start is genuinely just selling agents to other small businesses […] We have some customers who run an entire rental-car agency autonomously." In one instance, he discovered the infrastructure supporting a TikTok channel that posted AI-generated videos of cats and dogs dancing and boxing. Dorje noted that while the autonomous company toolkit faces the highest demand today, optimizing inference costs has become one of the fastest-growing sources of demand, explaining that "Part of running an autonomous company and running agents, like that's your biggest cost line now."
The reasoning behind Naïve's expansion into cost optimization reflects a critical challenge in agent deployment: keeping agents running can become prohibitively expensive as they call costly AI models, pass large amounts of context between tasks, and consume resources while idle. The company is using Series A proceeds to develop four infrastructure projects aimed at making agent loops more efficient. These include a model router to send queries to the most efficient model for each task while preserving and replaying already reasoned data; a memory system that stores and surfaces business context as agents need it; an orchestrator for dividing work among agents; and a serverless runtime that runs agents within lightweight JavaScript environments rather than assigning each one a complete virtual machine. This serverless approach lets customers pay primarily when an agent is active and makes deploying large numbers of agents less expensive. The company said the cost optimization business is attracting interest from enterprises, though it did not name any.
Naïve currently employs 10 full-time people and plans to use Series A proceeds to hire researchers and develop its four infrastructure projects: virtualized sandboxes for agents, model routing and inference optimization, a memory layer, and governance and orchestration. 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 round, which brings total capital raised to roughly $32 million. Developers may initially turn to Naïve to eliminate the tedium of setting up phone numbers and corporate cards, but as they scale, they'll likely care more about whether the platform can meaningfully cut the recurring expense of operating many agents, and enterprises with established operations may find value in that proposition as well. The shift from business setup to cost optimization could determine whether Naïve becomes a niche tool for side projects or essential infrastructure for organizations running agents at scale. The tension between democratizing entrepreneurship through automation and sustaining viable unit economics will likely shape how broadly this model for autonomous business can spread beyond early adopters.