Google Vets Raise $56 Million to Give AI Its ‘Android-Like Moment’

A group of tech veterans have reportedly raised $56 million to help construct an operating system for artificial intelligence (AI) agents.

As Bloomberg News reported Tuesday (Nov. 26), the new company — dubbed /dev/agents — is led by former Google and Stripe employees who worked on the Android operating system.

Their new seed funding round values /dev/agents at $500 million, the report added, citing a source familiar with the matter.

The report noted that several companies, Microsoft, OpenAI and Anthropic among them, are creating AI agents.

For example, Microsoft has recently debuted tools to help healthcare organizations build customized AI agents for appointment scheduling, clinical trial matching, and patient triage.

OpenAI’s new framework, Swarm, lets AI agents collaborate and independently execute complex tasks, potentially boosting business efficiency.

“While still experimental, the technology is poised to revolutionize workflows by enabling agents to autonomously handle processes like marketing and sales,” PYMNTS wrote last month.

However, the founders of /dev/agents think there’s a key component missing. If AI agents become as ever-present as apps, developers will need a common technical framework to connect those services and allow them to communicate with each other — similar to Apple’s iOS or Google’s Android.

“We need an Android-like moment for AI,” David Singleton, co-founder and CEO of /dev/agents, said in an interview with Bloomberg.

Singleton was a vice president of engineering on the Android project before becoming chief technology officer at FinTech company Stripe.

“We can see the promise of AI agents, but as a developer, it’s just too hard to build anything good,” he added.

Meanwhile, PYMNTS wrote earlier this month about tools such as the AI agent offered by Commerce.AI, exemplifying the trend of AI systems being trusted to handle sensitive customer interactions and operational decisions that guide company performance.

“While traditional AI approaches have centered around assistance, the ability for AI agents to reason, decide and take action will amplify results,” Archana Kannan, senior vice president of product for work messaging app Slack, told PYMNTS.

“Ultimately, agents are going to transform how every user gets their job done, particularly the mundane, common tasks like automating projects, new hire onboarding, generating content or managing IT incidents.”