Naïve Raises $28.5M to Let AI Agents Run Your Company

Naïve, a Palo Alto AI infrastructure startup founded by two 20-year-old UC Berkeley dropouts, has raised $28.5M in Series A funding to let AI agents handle the full operational stack of launching and running a business — from LLC formation to payments, email, and cloud infra — all through a single API. The company signed up over 30,000 developer customers within months of launch and grew ARR 10x in six months. The round was led by Nexus Venture Partners, with backing from Y Combinator and a roster of notable angels.

Vibe Coding, But for the Whole Business

The vibe-coding wave taught developers they didn't have to write every line themselves. Naïve wants to go one step further: don't just automate the code — automate the company.

Palo Alto-based Naïve Inc. is developing autonomous agents capable of setting up and running entire businesses.

The company has raised a $28.5 million Series A round led by Nexus Venture Partners to build what it calls the "operating stack for autonomous companies."

The funding brings Naïve's total capital raised to approximately $32 million.

One API to Spin Up a Business

The core product is deceptively simple in concept. Naïve packages the process of assembling payments, email accounts, phone numbers, cloud infrastructure, storage, and company incorporation behind a single API.

Developers hand a prompt to tools like Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex, which connect to Naïve's APIs to provision the setup and form a U.S. LLC — though users still complete KYC/KYB checks and make required payments. After that compliance handoff, the remaining setup — including email inboxes, virtual cards, phone numbers, databases, computing resources, and links to services like Stripe and QuickBooks — can be handled by AI.

There's also a guardrail layer built in: a governance layer lets users set budgets, restrict what agents can do, and require human approval before sensitive actions are taken.

Naïve also ships templates for businesses such as AI SEO, full-stack SaaS apps, recruiting, and customer support.

It's worth noting what this replaces. Historically, spinning up even a simple LLC-backed software business meant coordinating a lawyer for entity formation, a DevOps engineer for cloud provisioning, and a finance person for banking and payments rails — before writing a single line of product code. Naïve's bet is that most of that coordination layer can be collapsed into a prompt. That's a meaningful reduction in the fixed cost of starting something, and it lowers the floor for who can realistically launch a business.

Traction That Justified the Raise

The numbers behind this round are hard to dismiss. Naïve signed up over 30,000 developer customers within months of its launch.

The company scaled annual run-rate revenue by 10x to the low double-digit millions over the past six months, according to CEO and co-founder Sean Dorje.

The use cases emerging on the platform are eclectic. 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, Dorje discovered Naïve's infrastructure supporting a TikTok channel that posted AI-generated videos of cats and dogs dancing and boxing. It's a quirky data point — but it illustrates just how low the barrier to launching an AI-operated business has become. It also hints at an emerging category: businesses with no human operators in the loop at all, running on rented infrastructure, generating revenue (or at least views) autonomously.

Who's Backing It

The investor list reads like a who's-who of operator-angels. The round drew participation from Y Combinator, Zetta Venture Partners, and Liquid 2 Ventures, alongside angels including Gokul Rajaram, Apollo co-founder Tim Zheng, former HubSpot COO JD Sherman, Amazon's Gert Lanckriet, DocuSign President Robert Chatwani, and Codecademy co-founder Zachary Sims.

The angel roster skews heavily toward people who have built or scaled SaaS and developer-tools businesses — which makes sense given Naïve's API-first positioning. These aren't just brand-name validators; they're the kind of operators who understand the grunt work Naïve is trying to eliminate.

The founding team is equally notable for its youth. Naïve was founded by Sean Dorje and Dennis Zax, two 20-year-old University of California, Berkeley dropouts who have worked together since they were 14.

What This Means for Founders

For startup founders and indie builders, Naïve sits at the intersection of two accelerating trends: the commoditization of agentic AI workflows and the growing appetite for "one-click" business infrastructure. Stripe made payments a few lines of code. Clerк made auth a few lines of code. Naïve is making the argument that the entire back-office stack — entity, banking, cloud, comms — can follow the same pattern.

The broader agentic AI infrastructure space is heating up rapidly, and Naïve is not alone in this race. But its early traction — 30,000 developers, 10x ARR growth — suggests it has found genuine pull, not just investor enthusiasm. The governance layer is also worth watching: as agentic systems take on more financial and operational authority, the ability to set fine-grained controls over what AI can do unsupervised will likely become a competitive differentiator, not just a compliance checkbox.

For founders evaluating the space, the practical question isn't whether tools like this will become standard infrastructure — it's which platform will win the right to sit beneath the next generation of AI-native businesses.