A new startup called “/dev/agents,” founded by former Android leaders, is focused on launching a cloud-based operating system for artificial intelligence agents.
Currently based in San Francisco, the startup has raised $56 million and plans to announce its initial funding round led by Index Ventures and Alphabet’s investment fund CapitalG, with participation from a number of angel investors, including Scale AI CEO Alexander Wang, Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy. According to Bloomberg, the funding round values /dev/agents at $500 million.
More and more tech companies, including Microsoft, Anthropic, and OpenAI, are working on developing AI agents—systems that can perform everyday and work tasks, such as booking flights or writing code, with minimal human involvement.
The founders of /dev/agents believe that if AI agents are to become as widespread as apps, a unified technical framework will be required to connect these agents and enable them to interact with each other, much like how programs work in Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android.
“We need an Android moment for AI,” says David Singleton, co-founder and CEO of /dev/agents, who previously served as the Chief Technology Officer at fintech firm Stripe and was the Vice President of Product Development for Google Android.
The future operating system will run on phones, PCs, and even in cars. The startup also aims to create a new user interface that will allow people to interact more naturally with agents across different hardware devices.
Singleton and his team have extensive experience in operating system development: Hugo Barra, the startup’s product director, was formerly Vice President of Product Management for Android at Google and Vice President of Oculus at Meta; Chief Technology Officer Ficus Kirkpatrick worked on Android as an early engineer and later became Vice President of Augmented and Virtual Reality at Meta; Chief Designer Nicholas Zitko was the lead designer for Google Chrome OS and Head of Design at Dropbox.
“This is the team that built the last three generations of operating systems,” said Barra, reflecting on the group’s work on Android, wearable devices, and AR/VR.
