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’ve even managed to find ways to not do most of the work of putting products together.
So I wasn’t very surprised to hear that Naïve, 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.
Taking vibe coding a step further, the startup claims its infra can automate most of the work in setting up and running a business — 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.
Naïve supplies a prompt that developers can provide to tools like Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex, which can connect to the company’s API 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.
The rest of the set up can be done by your AI agents, 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’ 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.
The allure of such automation has clearly resonated, as evidenced by the user figure mentioned above. And Naïve 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.
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.
Dorje told TechCrunch that his customers are using Naïve to run autonomous businesses such as AI automation agencies, “face-less” online content channels on TikTok and YouTube, and even a rental car agency. In one case, he discovered Naïve’s infrastructure supporting a TikTok channel that posted AI-generated videos of cats and dogs dancing and boxing.
“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.”
But this toolkit for running businesses may only be part of Naïve’s 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.
Naïve is using some of the new capital to develop infrastructure that it says can make those agent loops more efficient. It’s 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.
Notably, Naïve is also building a serverless runtime that runs agents within lightweight JavaScript environments rather than assigning each one a complete virtual machine — an approach that lets customers pay primarily when an agent is active and makes it less expensive to deploy large numbers of agents.
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. “Part of running an autonomous company and running agents, like that’s your biggest cost line now, and so the highest growing demand right now, I would say is [for] inference and serverless agents,” he said.
He added that part of the business is getting interest from enterprises, though he did not name any.
That could prove to be a more valuable business than helping founders automatically set up phone numbers and corporate cards. Developers may initially use Naïve 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.
Naïve currently has 10 full-time employees. Dorje said proceeds from the Series A will be used to hire researchers and develop the company’s 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 Series A. The funding brings the company’s total capital raised to roughly $32 million.
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