We are excited to announce that CapitalG is co-leading a $56M Seed round in /dev/agents, a new company building an operating system for AI agents. It’s an ambitious vision from an equally ambitious team whose trailblazing work on pivotal platforms like Android makes them uniquely qualified to unlock the power of AI agents for all developers. We are thrilled to partner with David Singleton, Hugo Barra, Ficus Kirkpatrick, and Nicholas Jitkoff on day one of their journey – and beyond.
A New Computing Paradigm
As AI model capabilities improve at an astounding pace, an important new paradigm in computing is emerging: AI agents. An AI agent is a system that uses AI to act autonomously and achieve goals set by humans. Said more simply: Today, AI systems are primarily copilots assisting humans in their work; in contrast, an AI agent would be a true autopilot, removing humans from the loop on a given task.
In the coming years, AI agents will fundamentally transform the way we interact with software. For the first time, software will be able to operate truly autonomously and take on units of work that, until now, were only ever completed by humans.
Once true agentic capabilities are unlocked, the value of software will increase by an order of magnitude: AI agents will not just tap into and expand existing software markets; they will dramatically increase the value in human labor, helping people accomplish more than has ever been possible before. This fundamental shift in what software is capable of is already catalyzing the creation of a new, diverse ecosystem of products that were previously only possible in our imaginations.
Reimagining Foundations
While the promise of agentic AI charts a new frontier of product opportunity, a clear roadblock stands in its way: Today’s software systems are built for humans, not AI. Modern applications and websites are, unsurprisingly, designed with humans in mind. Functions and information are organized in a way that is aligned with human intuition and built to perform to the limits of human users, with context that is siloed across various devices and platforms. AI agents are capable enough today to adapt poorly to these interfaces of the past, but a new foundation is required to unlock AI’s full potential to transform how everyone uses software in their day-to-day lives.
There are clear parallels to the last great transformational wave in computing: mobile. Early in mobile’s lifecycle, technologists could see its potential, but for years its impact was limited because a smartphone is only as valuable as the ecosystem of apps that sits on top of it. To unlock mobile’s true value, developers needed a platform that empowered them to build great experiences easily (which is where Android and other mobile OS's came in). We face a similar moment today: AI agents hold tremendous promise, but without a robust platform supporting them, it is unrealistic for developers to deliver on this promise.
Enabling this future and building this foundation is no simple task. It requires enabling completely new UI patterns, a reimagined user data model, and, ultimately, clearly defining the rules of engagement and cooperation between AI agents and the broader world and across all digital contexts. It would be completely intractable for developers to solve this problem for every potential use case on their own. A new foundation is required to reliably abstract away this complexity and free developers to focus on what matters most: delighting users.
AI needs its platform moment.
Platform Pioneers
Pioneers at the forefront of every major computing platform shift this century, David Singleton, Hugo Barra, Ficus Kirkpatrick, and Nicholas Jitkoff have already developed software used by billions of people every single day. As early leaders in mobile, wearables, VR, and infrastructure (at market-defining companies Stripe, Google, Meta, and Figma), co-founders David, Hugo, Ficus, and Nicholas are uniquely qualified to unlock the next generation of computing. As investors, we meet many entrepreneurs, but it’s truly rare to meet founding teams as remarkable as this one:
David Singleton was most recently CTO at Stripe from 2018 to 2024, where he played a critical role in building the financial plumbing that is growing the GDP of the internet. We at CapitalG were fortunate to see David’s impact as a leader not just as longtime investors in Stripe, but also before then when he served as VP of Engineering at Google overseeing the development of new surfaces in Android specifically and mobile more broadly. While at Google he founded Android Wear, the version of Google's Android operating system designed for smartwatches and other wearables.
Hugo Barra has also made his career building products during early pivotal moments in computing. Out of college he co-founded a startup building speech recognition tech that powered the 1st generation of Apple's Siri. He then spent nearly ten years working in the Android ecosystem first at Google where he led product management for the Android OS, and then at Xiaomi building their global smartphone business. Most recently, Hugo spent four years as the VP at Meta overseeing Oculus VR products, and then as co-founder and CEO of Detect (an AI health diagnostics company).
Ficus Kirkpatrick, remarkably, was an even earlier pioneer in the shift to mobile computing. He was one of the creators of the Danger Hiptop (aka T-Mobile Sidekick), the first modern smartphone with an always-on connection to the Internet. He was then an engineer on the original Android team before the Google acquisition, and then built Google Play into a multibillion-dollar business as its engineering leader. More recently, he worked with Hugo as a VP at Meta overseeing the development of VR and AR platforms.
Nicholas Jitkoff has played a key role in the design of new computing platforms—including Chrome OS, Android, and Oculus—with a focus on exploratory input, interaction, and systems design. He was principal designer on Material Design, building out Google's holistic interface framework, was VP of Design at Dropbox, and later led the core systems and AI design teams at Figma.
While the specific details of this AI-centered moment in computing differ from the waves that came before, the underlying principles remain the same: the need to build a durable set of primitives hand-in-hand with an engaged community of forward-looking developers and users. This truly N of 1 team possesses the singular skill-set and experience required to build the foundational platform enabling developers to leverage agentic AI – much like they built foundational platforms in internet, mobile, and VR.
Introducing /dev/agents
/dev/agents is building the operating system that will arm developers with the tools they need to work with AI agents. The vision is to provide a central system that builds a shared understanding of each user and provides the necessary UI primitives, developer platform, and surrounding ecosystem to build a new class of delightful products.
/dev/agents will empower developers to build our agentic future.
Inspired by Stripe’s name at the time of founding (/dev/payments), David, Hugo, Ficus, and Nicholas are building towards this expansive vision deliberately, one step at a time. The company is building a small, talented team to work closely with users and developers across the full stack (from tuning models up through to the UI layer) to solve a novel class of system and UX problems created by AI. The team is currently hiring world-class engineers and AI experts in the San Francisco Bay Area.
CapitalG’s Investment in /dev/agents
We’re proud to co-lead /dev/agents’ $56M Seed round alongside Index Ventures, with participation from Sarah Guo at Conviction and prominent angel investors including AI builders Andrej Karpathy and Alexandr Wang, platform and ecosystem builders Andy Rubin and Dave Burke, product designer Soleio, and operators Claire Hughes Johnson, Nikesh Arora, and Shishir Mehrotra. We are absolutely thrilled to partner with David, Hugo, Ficus, and Nicholas as they set out to, once again, build a reliable foundation for a new era of computing.