The team that created Android is working on an operating system for artificial intelligence. What is known?

A new startup called “/dev/agents”, founded by former Android leaders, is focused on launching a cloud-based operating system for artificial intelligence agents.

So far, the San Francisco-based startup has raised $56 million and is preparing to announce an initial investment round led by Index Ventures and Alphabet’s CapitalG investment fund, with participation from a number of angel investorsBusiness angels are wealthy individuals who invest money in startup businesses, typically in exchange for convertible debt or equity in the company. — including Scale AI's CEO Alexander Wang, Palo Alto Networks CEO Nikesh Arora, and OpenAI co-founder Andrej Karpathy. According to Bloomberg, the funding round values /dev/agents at $500 million.

More and more tech companies, including Microsoft, Anthropic, and OpenAI, are embarking on the development of artificial intelligence agents—systems capable of performing everyday tasks and work duties, such as booking flights or writing code, with minimal human involvement.

The founders of /dev/agents believe that if AI agents are ever to become as ubiquitous as applications, a common technical framework will be needed to connect these agents and allow them to interact with one another (similar to how applications operate on Apple's iOS or Google's Android).

“We need an Android-like moment for AI,” says David Singleton, co-founder and CEO of /dev/agents, who previously served as CTO at fintech firm Stripe and was a vice president of product development for Android at Google.

The future operating system will function on phones, PCs, and even in cars. The startup also aims to create a new user interface that will allow people to interact “more naturally” with agents across different hardware devices.

Singleton, along with his team, possesses a wealth of experience in operating system development: Hugo Barra, the product director of the startup, was previously the vice president of product management for Android at Google and vice president of Oculus at Meta; Chief Technology Officer Ficus Kirkpatrick worked on Android as an early engineer and later served as vice president for augmented and virtual reality at Meta; Chief Designer Nicholas Zitkoff was the lead designer for Google Chrome OS and head of Dropbox.

“This is a team that has built the last three generations of operating systems,” said Barra, reflecting on the team's work on Android, wearables, and AR/VR.