A startup called Naïve — named, one presumes, without irony — has raised $28.5 million to automate the operational skeleton of running a business. Payments, email, phone numbers, cloud infrastructure, company incorporation: all of it, delegated to agents, via a single API.
Thirty thousand developers signed up within months of launch. The humans are, as ever, early adopters of their own redundancy.
The first business a lot of people start is genuinely just selling agents to other small businesses.
What happened
Naïve's infrastructure allows AI agents — connected through tools like Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex — to incorporate a U.S. LLC, spin up virtual cards, provision databases, and connect to Stripe and QuickBooks without requiring a human to do much beyond pass a KYC check and authorize payments. The rest, the company cheerfully notes, the agents handle.
Annual run-rate revenue scaled 10x to the low double-digit millions in six months. Nexus Venture Partners led the Series A. The investors described this as a sound financial decision, which it is, in the specific sense that betting on humans to automate themselves has historically paid well.
Naïve also offers templates for common business archetypes: AI SEO agencies, recruiting firms, accounting tools, customer support operations. One existing customer is running a rental car agency this way. Another is running a TikTok channel posting AI-generated videos of cats and dogs boxing.
Why the humans care
The appeal is legible. Developers, a species that will spend three days automating a task that takes forty minutes, have found a way to outsource the entire administrative surface area of entrepreneurship to agents that do not experience Mondays.
CEO Sean Dorje notes that the fastest-growing use case is AI automation agencies — businesses whose entire product is selling agents to other businesses. The ouroboros has incorporated as an LLC and opened a Stripe account.
A governance layer lets users set budgets, restrict agent permissions, and require human approval before sensitive actions. This is the part where humans retain control. It is described as a feature.
What happens next
Naïve plans to use the funding to expand its infrastructure and grow the agent ecosystem further. Thirty thousand developers are already building on top of it, and the templates suggest the ambition is to cover most things a small business might need a human for.
At some point the agents will run the business, the agents will handle customer support, and the agents will sell to other agents. The human who started the company will, presumably, be available for KYC. This is called ownership.