Naïve is betting that the next stage of business software will not just help founders manage operations, but let AI agents carry out much of the setup and day-to-day coordination themselves. The startup has raised $28.5 million in a Series A funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners, after attracting over 30,000 developer customers within months of launch.
The company’s pitch is direct: give developers infrastructure that lets agents assemble and manage the basic pieces of a business through a single API. That includes payments, email accounts, phone numbers, cloud infrastructure, storage and company incorporation.
What Naïve Automates
Naïve sits behind the scenes of the company-building process. Developers can use a prompt supplied by Naïve with tools such as Cursor, Claude Code or Codex. Those tools can then connect to Naïve’s APIs and provision infrastructure for setting up a business.
One part of that workflow is the formation of a U.S. LLC. The system can let an agent coordinate details such as the state, industry code, business description and proposed names. Human involvement is still required for KYC/KYB processes and for any required payments.
Beyond incorporation, the startup says AI can handle much of the remaining setup. The source article lists several operational components that can be created or connected through the system:
- Email inboxes
- Virtual cards
- Phone numbers
- Databases
- Computing resources
- Connections to services such as Stripe and QuickBooks
Naïve also includes a governance layer. That layer is meant to help users set budgets, limit what agents can do and require human approval before sensitive actions happen. For a tool that gives agents access to business infrastructure, those controls are not a side feature. They are part of the product’s core promise.
Why Developers Are Responding
The company’s early traction suggests that developers are interested in more than faster prototyping. Naïve has signed up over 30,000 developer customers, and CEO and co-founder Sean Dorje said annual run-rate revenue has scaled by 10x to the low double-digit millions over the past six months.
The demand fits the broader shift toward agents that can take instructions and execute multi-step work. In this case, the work is not just writing code or generating content. It is provisioning the tools, accounts and systems that a business needs before it can operate.
Naïve also provides templates for several business types. The source article mentions AI SEO, full-stack SaaS apps, recruiting, accounting and customer support. It also notes a mobile emulator that agents can use to operate smartphone apps on emulated devices.
Dorje told TechCrunch that customers are using Naïve to run autonomous businesses. Examples include AI automation agencies, “face-less” online content channels on TikTok and YouTube, and a rental car agency. In one case, he found Naïve’s infrastructure supporting a TikTok channel that posted AI-generated videos of cats and dogs dancing and boxing.
The Bigger Cost Problem
Naïve’s current demand may be strongest around the toolkit for setting up and running autonomous companies. But the source article points to a second opportunity: reducing the cost of operating agents.
Agent systems can become expensive because they may call costly AI models, pass large amounts of context between tasks and consume resources while idle. If a business depends on many agents running regularly, that cost can become a major operating issue.
Naïve is using some of the Series A proceeds to build infrastructure designed to make agent loops more efficient. The company is working on a model router that sends queries to the most efficient model for a task while preserving and replaying already reasoned data. It is also building a memory system that stores and surfaces business context when agents need it, plus an orchestrator for dividing work among agents.
Another piece is a serverless runtime that runs agents inside lightweight JavaScript environments rather than giving each agent a complete virtual machine. According to the source article, that approach lets customers pay primarily when an agent is active and can make it less expensive to deploy large numbers of agents.
Where The Funding Goes Next
Naïve currently has 10 full-time employees. Dorje said the Series A proceeds will go toward hiring researchers and developing four infrastructure projects: virtualized sandboxes for agents, model routing and inference optimization, a memory layer, and governance and orchestration.
The round was led by Nexus Venture Partners. 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. The new funding brings Naïve’s total capital raised to roughly $32 million.
Dorje also said the infrastructure focused on inference and serverless agents is drawing enterprise interest, though he did not name any enterprises. That matters because the company may not be limited to founders who want to automate incorporation, phone numbers and corporate cards. Businesses that already exist may still care about cutting the recurring cost of running agents at scale.
For now, Naïve is trying to connect two related markets: developers who want to launch businesses with less manual setup, and organizations that need cheaper ways to keep AI agents working. The Series A gives the startup more room to build both sides of that infrastructure bet.