Naïve Secures $28.5M to Streamline Business Operations through AI Automation

Naïve, a technology company focused on business automation, has completed a Series A funding round, securing $28.5 million. The investment was led by Nexus Venture Partners, with additional participation from Y Combinator, Zetta, Liquid 2, and angel investors including Gokul Rajaram, Tim Zheng (co-founder of Apollo.io), and JD Sherman (former HubSpot COO). This latest capital infusion brings Naïve's total funding to approximately $32 million.

The company's platform offers infrastructure designed to enable artificial intelligence agents to handle a significant portion of the tasks involved in establishing and operating a business. Since its launch, Naïve has attracted over 30,000 developer customers. Its service centralizes various foundational business components, such as payment processing, email accounts, phone numbers, cloud infrastructure, data storage, and company incorporation, accessible through a single application programming interface (API).

Developers can utilize prompts provided by Naïve with AI tools like Cursor, Claude Code, or Codex. These tools then connect to Naïve's API to provision the necessary infrastructure for business setup. The system supports the formation of a U.S. Limited Liability Company (LLC), allowing agents to provide details such as the state of incorporation, industry code, business description, and potential company names. While users must still complete Know Your Customer (KYC) and Know Your Business (KYB) processes and manage payments, AI agents can automate the remaining setup, including creating email inboxes, virtual cards, phone numbers, databases, computing resources, and integrations with services like Stripe and QuickBooks.

A built-in governance layer allows users to define budgets, limit agent capabilities, and mandate human approval for sensitive actions. Naïve also offers business templates for various functions, including AI SEO, full-stack Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) applications, recruitment, accounting, customer support, and a mobile emulator for agents to interact with smartphone applications on emulated devices.

The demand for this automation is evident in the company's financial growth. Naïve has seen its annual recurring revenue increase tenfold over the past six months, reaching low double-digit millions, according to CEO and co-founder Sean Dorje. Dorje indicated that clients are leveraging Naïve to operate autonomous businesses, such as AI automation agencies, online content channels on platforms like TikTok and YouTube that operate without human faces, and even a rental car agency.

A significant area of focus for Naïve is optimizing the operational efficiency and cost of running AI agents. The capital from the Series A round will be directed toward developing infrastructure to make agent loops more efficient. This includes a model router to direct queries to the most suitable model for a given task, a memory system to store and retrieve business context for agents, and an orchestrator to manage work distribution among agents.

Additionally, Naïve is developing a serverless runtime environment, which enables agents to operate within lightweight JavaScript environments rather than requiring a full virtual machine for each. This approach allows customers to primarily pay only when an agent is actively working, reducing costs for deploying a large number of agents. While the autonomous company toolkit is currently a primary demand driver, Dorje noted that optimizing inference costs is becoming one of the fastest-growing areas of client interest. He also mentioned that this aspect of the business is attracting interest from enterprises, though specific names were not disclosed.

Naïve currently employs 10 full-time staff. The Series A funds will facilitate the hiring of researchers and further development of four key infrastructure projects: virtualized sandboxes for agents, model routing and inference optimization, a memory layer, and enhanced governance and orchestration capabilities.

This strategic focus suggests that while simplifying initial company setup is a core offering, Naïve's long-term value proposition may increasingly lie in its ability to significantly reduce the ongoing operational costs associated with managing a large fleet of AI agents, a benefit that could appeal to both startups and established enterprises.