Naïve automates the grunt work of setting up and running a company, plus, Defense tech Hadrian raises $1.37B, and Omilia raises $67M to scale its customer support platform

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0:50So you can focus on other important things, like savoring that last bit of pumpkin pie. From early startups to Fortune 500 companies, thousands are turning to Framer to build a website they'll love. Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com slash tcstartups for 30 % off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash tcstartups for 30 % off. Rules and restrictions may apply. 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.

1:32And as VibeCoding has proved, they've even managed to find ways to not do most of the work of putting products together. So it's not a big surprise to hear that Naive, 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 VibeCoding 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.

2:22Naive supplies a prompt that developers can provide to tools like Cursor, Cloud Code, or Codex, which can connect to the company's API to provision the infrastructure to set up a business. It lets an agent orchestrate the formation of a US 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 and KYB processes and make any required payments. The rest of the setup can be done by your AI agents, including setting up email inboxes, virtual cards, phone numbers, databases, computing resources, and connections to services such as Stripe and QuickBooks.

3:12A 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 has clearly resonated, as evidenced by the user figure mentioned above, and Naive has scaled annual run rate revenue by 10x to the low double-digit millions over the past six months. That's according to CEO and co-founder Sean Dorji.

4:01Dorji told TechCrunch that his customers are using Naive to run autonomous businesses, such as AI automation agencies, faceless online content channels on TikTok and YouTube, and even a rental car agency. In one case, he discovered Naive's infrastructure supporting a TikTok channel that posted AI-generated videos of cats and dogs dancing and boxing. Georgie said, I think the one that's growing the fastest right now is AI automation agencies. 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.

4:43But this toolkit for running businesses may only be part of Naive's opportunity. Using AI to automate everything sounds great. But the cost of keeping agents running can grow astronomical, as they call expensive AI models, pass large amounts of context between tasks, and consume resources while sitting idle. Naive is using some of the new capital to develop infrastructure that it says can make those agent loops more efficient. It's building a model router to send queries to the most efficient model for a task while preserving and replaying already reasoned data, a memory system that stores and services business context as needed by agents to do their tasks, and an orchestrator for dividing work among agents.

5:35Notably, Naive is also building a serverless runtime that runs agents within lightweight JavaScript environments rather than assigning each one a complete virtual machine, an approach that lets customers pay primarily when an agent is active and makes it less expensive to deploy large numbers of agents. While the autonomous company toolkit is in the most demand today, Dorji said optimizing inference costs is one of its fastest-growing sources of demand. He said, part of running an autonomous company and running agents, that's your biggest cost line now. And so the highest-growing demand right now, I would say, is for inference and serverless agents.

6:19He added that part of the business is getting interest from enterprises, though he did not name any. that could prove to be a more valuable business than helping founders automatically set up phone numbers and corporate cards. Developers may initially use Naive to deal with the tedium of setting up a company, but as they grow, they may care more about whether it can meaningfully reduce the recurring cost of operating a horde of agents. Enterprises with established businesses may find something to care about on that front as well. Naive currently has 10 full-time employees, Dorji said proceeds from the Series A will be used to hire researchers and develop the company's four infrastructure projects, which are virtualized sandboxes for agents, model routing and inference optimization, a memory layer, and governance and orchestration.

7:15adrian a defense tech company announced on thursday that it had raised a fresh 1.37 billion round at a valuation of 7.87 billion dollars from a mile-long list of well-known investors the lead investors in the round include wcm investment management washington harbor partners Valor Equity Partners, 137 Ventures, and Bailey Gifford. Participating investors include 1789 Capital, Morgan Stanley Wealth Management, funds managed by Apollo and T. Rowe Price, as well as Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Altimeter, and others. Founders Fund and Lux led the company's$260 million Series C financing about a year ago, bringing the total raised to date to around$2 billion, and that's according to PitchBook estimates.

8:08Hadrian is an interesting defense tech in that it's not trying to build new AI-powered weapons. The company is building automated manufacturing facilities that will mass-produce parts for the vehicles that the military complex already relies on. For instance, in March, Hadrian opened a facility in Alabama to mass-produce parts for submarines, making that its fourth facility. The deal for that facility, structured as a public-private partnership, was valued at$2.4 billion.

8:46The customer support industry has seen a massive influx of startups like Sierra, Decagon, and Parloa trying to infuse AI into automating customer calls, chat, and messages so companies can handle more queries at scale. But according to Athens-based Omelia, which has been working on automating voice calls and customer support since 2002, throwing AI at every process can be wasteful. The company's CEO, Demetrius Vassos, says that a large proportion of incoming customer support queries involve basic information, such as account balances, and there's little need to deploy large language models for such tasks.

9:31He said, We will use any available weapon to win the battle for customer service. Companies like Sierra, Decagon, they identify as generative AI companies. Their sole purpose is to deploy generative AI and limit themselves. You may have a bazooka, but if your enemy is near you, you need a knife. This is the reality of the contact center, where you need multiple tools. O'Melia itself has expanded its operations to building self-learning agents that can work across different customer contact points. To build that out, the company has now raised a$67 million Series B, led by Expedition Growth Capital.

10:13This round is the company's second time raising capital after it raised$20 million from Grafton Capital back in 2020. Since then, it has managed to increase its annual recurring revenue by 10x to$60 million. Vasos says Amelia's key differentiation lies in having great unit economics for both itself and its customers. And thanks to this approach, it has not needed large cash infusions as compared to its competitors. He said, in the next few years, we will see the companies that can offer real return on investment prevail. You know, we don't mind that we're not as sexy as Eleven Labs and Sierra on LinkedIn right now.

10:58we care about growing steadily and building the foundations for a billion-dollar revenue company in the next three years. Amelia's clients include Capital One, Discover, RBC, DWP, and PSEG, and Vassos said quick-service restaurants that have adopted voice-based ordering are now a big focus. The company already has Taco Bell as a client and has deployed its tech across more than 1 ,000 outlets. Vassos said that it is in talks with two more quick-service restaurants in the U.S. Omelia will use the fresh cash to open a new office in the U.S., a market that accounts for a significant chunk of its revenue.

11:40It will also bolster its go-to-market team and is hiring a chief revenue officer, chief marketing officer, and a VP of revenue operations. The company has around 500 employees at the moment and expects its headcount to reach 600 by the end of the year. That's all for now. For the latest in startup tech news, go to techcrunch.com.

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