Ever since generative synthetic intelligence entered the mainstream, one among its most provocative guarantees has been the concept that a single particular person may run a billion-dollar firm
The Common Intelligence Firm of New York is constructing towards that imaginative and prescient. The startup introduced this month that it raised $8.7 million in seed funding to develop agent-based methods designed to take over giant parts of firm operations, transferring the thought of a one-person enterprise from principle towards execution.
The corporate’s title intentionally evokes Gilded Age ambition, and founder Andrew Pignanelli instructed PYMNTS that the reference was intentional. He mentioned he views AI as foundational infrastructure for the subsequent period of company-building, a lot as railroads and industrial capital reshaped the US economic system greater than a century in the past. Common Intelligence’s flagship product, Cofounder, is designed to let people function firms by delegating execution to coordinated AI brokers fairly than human groups.
The corporate started by working backward from what Pignanelli known as the one-person billion-dollar enterprise.
“We began on the finish, the precise one-person billion-dollar firm, and labored our approach again and we had been like, ‘What can we do in the present day?’” he mentioned.
Slightly than embedding AI into remoted workflows, the objective is to create methods the place a human features like a CEO whereas coordinated AI brokers deal with execution throughout engineering, advertising and marketing, operations and buyer help.
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On the lowest stage, many particular person contributor duties are already approaching full automation, Pignanelli mentioned. Code technology, design and advertising and marketing execution have superior quickly, with methods now nearing the power to generate and deploy production-ready code with out breaking reside environments. What stays unsolved are the higher-order issues that distinguish actual firms from activity automation.
“What shouldn’t be there’s coordination and reminiscence methods,” he mentioned, including that AI nonetheless lacks the power to take care of a sturdy understanding of how a enterprise operates over time or to handle teams of brokers the best way individuals handle groups.
By automating non-differentiating work, AI may decrease limitations to entrepreneurship as productiveness beneficial properties and automation reshape labor markets, he mentioned.
With recent capital and rising consideration on agent-based methods, Common Intelligence is pushing towards what Pignanelli described as the primary totally autonomous firm. He mentioned the corporate is sprinting towards that milestone, and it may emerge within the first half of 2026.
Different Funding Exercise
Retail knowledge intelligence agency Crisp raised $26 million in a Sequence B1 spherical to increase its AI options for retailers and client packaged items manufacturers. The corporate operates in part of the retail stack the place fragmented knowledge throughout suppliers and retailers usually results in stock mismatches, forecasting errors and strained relationships. By reconciling knowledge from a number of methods, Crisp goals to give manufacturers and retailers a extra dependable view of demand and inventory ranges as omnichannel success grows extra advanced and margins stay below strain.
Enterprise automation startup Serval raised $75 million in a Sequence B funding spherical led by Sequoia Capital, valuing the corporate at $1 billion. Serval builds AI brokers that deal with routine inside work throughout IT, HR, authorized and finance. As enterprises look to transfer generative AI past particular person productiveness instruments, Serval’s strategy displays demand for methods that may execute work straight inside current enterprise environments.
Infrastructure funding can be adapting to operational calls for. Actual-time generative media startup Fal raised $140 million in a Sequence D spherical led by Sequoia Capital, with participation from Kleiner Perkins, Alkeon Capital and Nvidia’s NVentures. The corporate focuses on low-latency picture and video technology, supporting purposes the place AI outputs should be delivered immediately fairly than offline. As generative AI more and more seems in customer-facing merchandise, inference efficiency and responsiveness have gotten central to consumer expertise.
Prime Safety raised $20 million in a Sequence A spherical to increase its agentic safety platform, embedding autonomous safety checks straight into improvement workflows. Sooner launch cycles and elevated use of AI-generated code have made conventional, handbook safety critiques tougher to scale, pushing enterprises to combine safety with out slowing supply.
Conversational AI firm PolyAI raised $86 million to increase its enterprise voice assistant platform, concentrating on industries the place accuracy, reliability and compliance are essential. As contact facilities stay among the many most labor-intensive enterprise features, the funding displays continued curiosity in AI methods that may resolve extra inquiries end-to-end with out human intervention.
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