Naïve, a startup that provides infrastructure for AI agents to automate the grunt work of setting up and running a business, has raised $28.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners, TechCrunch has exclusively learned. The company has already attracted over 30,000 developer customers within months of its launch, and CEO Sean Dorje said annual run-rate revenue has grown 10x to the low double-digit millions over the past six months.
Naïve’s pitch is straightforward: take vibe-coding a step further by letting AI agents handle the bulk of the work involved in establishing and operating a company. The platform packages the process of assembling payments, email accounts, phone numbers, cloud infrastructure, storage, and even company incorporation behind a single API. Developers can provide a prompt to tools like Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex, which connect to Naïve’s APIs to provision the infrastructure needed to launch a business.
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From LLC formation to autonomous rental car agencies
Naïve’s system can orchestrate the formation of a U.S. LLC, handling details such as state selection, industry code, and business description, though users are still required to complete KYC/KYB processes and make any required payments. Beyond that, AI agents can set up email inboxes, virtual cards, phone numbers, databases, and computing resources, as well as integrate with services like Stripe and QuickBooks. A governance layer lets users set budgets, restrict agent capabilities, and require human approval before sensitive actions.
The company also offers business templates for AI SEO, full-stack SaaS apps, recruiting, accounting, customer support, and even a mobile emulator for agents to operate smartphone apps on emulated devices. Dorje told TechCrunch that 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 a TikTok channel posting AI-generated videos of cats and dogs dancing and boxing, powered by Naïve’s infrastructure.
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“I think the one that’s growing the fastest right now is AI automation agencies,” Dorje said. “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.”
Cutting the cost of running AI agents
While the autonomous company toolkit is the most visible use case, Naïve is also betting on a potentially larger opportunity: reducing the cost of keeping AI agents running. As agents call expensive AI models, pass large amounts of context between tasks, and consume resources while idle, costs can grow quickly. Naïve is using part of the new capital to develop infrastructure aimed at making agent loops more efficient.
The company is 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, and an orchestrator for dividing work among agents. Notably, Naïve is also developing a serverless runtime that runs agents within lightweight JavaScript environments rather than assigning each one a complete virtual machine. This approach lets customers pay primarily when an agent is active, making it less expensive to deploy large numbers of agents.
Dorje said optimizing inference costs is one of the company’s 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 attracting 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 handle 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.
Funding and roadmap
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 round. The funding brings the company’s total capital raised to roughly $32 million.
The rapid adoption of Naïve’s platform reflects a broader trend of AI moving from generating code to operating entire business functions. As more developers experiment with autonomous agents, the cost and efficiency of running those agents will likely become a key competitive battleground. Naïve’s focus on inference optimization suggests the company is positioning itself not just as a business setup tool, but as a foundational layer for the emerging agent economy.
Disclaimer: This article is for informational purposes only and does not constitute financial advice. The cryptocurrency and AI startup markets are highly volatile and uncertain. Readers should conduct their own research before making any investment decisions.
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