Hone: Austrian Founder Moritz Stephan Raises $60 Million for A.I. Agents
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A seed round the size of a Series B: The San Francisco A.I. start-up Hone has just raised $60 million (about €53 million) from the Silicon Valley heavyweights Benchmark and Index Ventures. Its founder and chief executive is the Austrian Moritz Stephan, who built the company together with Oliver Brady and Carlo Kobe. According to Bloomberg, the round values Hone at $285 million (about €254 million).
A.I. Agents That Are Meant to Deliver Results
Hone builds what it calls “Engines,” A.I. agents that independently take ownership of an entire business goal over weeks or months. A company might, for example, set the goal of improving customer retention, cutting procurement costs or converting more leads into sales. According to Hone, the Engine then learns the company’s systems, processes and people, decides on its own which steps are needed and brings in colleagues when necessary. In the end, it is supposed to be measured by the profit and loss statement.
Because such agents need access to sensitive systems, Hone relies on guardrails: Decisions are simulated in advance, sensitive actions require human approval and everything is logged. Early customers include the A.I. coding start-up Cognition and the A.I. infrastructure company Modal. Peter Fenton of Benchmark and Shardul Shah of Index are joining the board, and Elad Gil and SV Angel are also on board as investors. Cognition’s chief executive, Scott Wu, has invested personally.
From Mars Rover to Devin
Mr. Stephan is no stranger to Austria’s start-up scene. He took his first steps as a founder while still in high school: Together with Konstantin Klingler, he launched Lobu in Vienna, a start-up that delivered books from small local bookshops by bicycle courier and positioned itself as an alternative to Amazon. The two also pitched the idea on the Austrian TV show “2 Minuten 2 Millionen.” Also as a teenager, he co-founded Tumbleweed with Julian Rothenbuchner, a project for a wind-powered Mars rover whose prototype was tested during analog missions of the Austrian Space Forum and which lives on today as an independent space start-up. He went to Stanford to study computer science, where he did research on agents in the lab of the A.I. researcher Chelsea Finn.
At Stanford, he launched the anonymous campus app Fizz with Carlo Kobe in 2021, which made it into the start-up accelerator Y Combinator. He later joined Cognition, the start-up behind the A.I. software engineer Devin. As one of its first employees, he helped build Devin’s planning and execution system and eventually became chief of staff to Mr. Wu. He also worked for Trunk Tools, the New York construction tech start-up founded by the Austrian entrepreneur Sarah Buchner.
His co-founders also bring experience from sought-after A.I. start-ups. Mr. Brady was one of the first engineers at the legal A.I. start-up Harvey and then helped build the enterprise business at the A.I. recruiting start-up Mercor. Mr. Kobe, Mr. Stephan’s co-founder at Fizz, is a Thiel Fellow who left Harvard to start the company and led Fizz for several years.
A Crowded Field for A.I. Agents
Hone is entering a fiercely contested market. Well-funded start-ups such as Decagon and Sierra build A.I. agents for businesses, Salesforce sells its Agentforce platform, and OpenAI recently introduced its own agents for office work with Dots. Whether Hone can make the leap from A.I.-savvy early adopters to traditional large companies and prove concrete savings remains to be seen. So far, the start-up has not disclosed any revenue figures or customer results.
