Naïve raises $28.5M to automate the grunt work of setting up and running a company
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
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 in 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 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. 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’ 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 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. Image Credits: Naive Image Credits:Naive / 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.
The BriefWire