Naïve raises $28.5M to automate business setup and operations

Naïve secures funding to build autonomous business infrastructure

Palo Alto-based Naïve Inc. has closed a $28.5 million Series A funding round led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Y Combinator, Zetta, Liquid 2, and angel investors. The AI lab is building infrastructure that enables autonomous agents to establish and operate businesses with minimal human intervention.

The company has already attracted more than 30,000 developer customers to its platform, which provides a unified API for provisioning everything needed to launch a company. This includes payment infrastructure, email accounts, phone numbers, cloud resources, storage, and business incorporation. Developers use the platform with third-party agentic tools like Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor to orchestrate these tasks through prompts.

How the platform works

Naïve's system can guide AI agents through creating a U.S.-based limited liability company by specifying details like state, business description, industry code, and proposed name. Business owners must still complete Know Your Customer and Know Your Business processes themselves and handle required payments, but agents can automate nearly everything else.

The infrastructure extends to setting up email inboxes, phone numbers, databases, compute resources, and integrations with payment processors like Stripe and accounting platforms like QuickBooks. A governance layer lets users restrict agent capabilities, establish budgets, and determine which actions require human approval. The platform includes templates for AI SEO, full-stack SaaS applications, customer support, recruiting, and accounting, plus a mobile emulator for agents to navigate smartphone apps on virtual devices.

Customers have used the platform to run autonomous businesses ranging from content channels on TikTok and YouTube to AI-managed car rental firms.

Cost optimization as the real opportunity

While the business setup toolkit addresses an immediate need, Naïve sees a larger opportunity in reducing AI automation costs. Running autonomous agents can become expensive as they make hundreds of calls to costly models, pass large volumes of context, and consume resources while idle.

The company has built several optimization features: a model router that directs agents to the most cost-effective AI model for each task, a memory system for storing and reusing business context, and a serverless runtime environment that runs agents in lightweight JavaScript environments. These innovations aim to slash operational expenses for automated businesses.

Co-founder and CEO Sean Dorje emphasized the importance of this efficiency work, noting that agent spending could grow to trillions of dollars as automation adoption increases. The company has achieved impressive growth, with revenue increasing more than tenfold over the last six months to reach an annual run-rate in the low double-digit millions.

Why it matters

The cost optimization component may prove more valuable than the initial setup automation. While entrepreneurs need infrastructure provisioning once, they'll need cost-efficient agent operations for as long as their businesses run. If Naïve can meaningfully reduce the expense of running autonomous operations, it positions itself as essential infrastructure for the duration of those businesses, not just their launch phase. This shift from one-time setup to ongoing operational efficiency represents a fundamentally different business model with stronger retention dynamics.

Abishek Sharma of Nexus Venture Partners said autonomous software has become established, and fully autonomous companies are the next step. "Naïve gives millions of entrepreneurs and small businesses worldwide the turnkey infrastructure needed to build and run autonomous companies without needing to become AI experts," he said.

These details were first reported by SiliconANGLE.