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Naïve automates the grunt work of setting up and running a company, plus, Defense tech Hadrian raises $1.37B, and Omilia raises $67M to scale its customer support platform

TechCrunch Startup News · 2026-08-07 · 12 min

0:00--:--

Key moments - from our scoring

Substance score

47 / 100

Five dimensions, 20 points each

Insight Density9 / 20
Originality7 / 20
Guest Caliber12 / 20
Specificity & Evidence13 / 20
Conversational Craft6 / 20

This episode profiles three high-growth startups addressing automation across different sectors. Naïve provides infrastructure that lets AI agents handle the tedious work of incorporating LLCs, setting up payment processors, email, phone numbers, and cloud resources through a single API - enabling developers to orchestrate autonomous businesses without manual setup. The company has signed 30,000 developers and scaled ARR 10x to low double-digit millions in six months. CEO Sean Dorjee highlights use cases from AI automation agencies to autonomous rental car operations and viral TikTok channels, though he notes inference cost optimization is becoming the fastest-growing demand segment as enterprises scale agent fleets. Hadrian, meanwhile, has raised $1.37B at a $7.87B valuation to automate manufacturing facilities producing submarine parts and military vehicle components - a different kind of automation that doesn't rely on AI but rather precision robotics for defense supply chains. Finally, Omilia, operating since 2002, distinguishes itself from AI-first competitors like Sierra and Decagon by deploying targeted automation: using simple rule-based systems for basic queries (account balances) and reserving language models for complex issues. The company has grown ARR 10x to $60M and now serves Capital One, Discover, RBC, and Taco Bell across 1,000+ outlets, with Series B funding fueling US expansion and go-to-market hiring.

Key takeaways

  • →Naïve automates business infrastructure through AI - from LLC formation to Stripe integration - enabling developers to orchestrate entire autonomous companies via API, with 30,000+ developer signups and $10-20M ARR after 6 months.
  • →Inference optimization and serverless agent deployment are Naïve's fastest-growing revenue segment as enterprise customers seek to reduce the per-token costs of running large agent fleets.
  • →Omilia's strategy of applying targeted automation (simple logic for routine queries, LLMs only for complex issues) delivers superior unit economics compared to AI-first competitors like Sierra and Decagon, supporting $60M ARR and major enterprise clients.
  • →Hadrian's $1.37B funding enables automated manufacturing of military components - not AI-powered weapons - with facilities like the $2.4B Alabama submarine parts operation structured as public-private partnerships.
  • →The customer support market is bifurcating: generalist AI companies deploy language models broadly, while specialists like Omilia optimize tool selection by use case, resulting in higher ROI and stickier enterprise relationships.

Guests

Sean DorjeeDimitris Vasos

Topics in this episode

AI agentsCustomer support automationHadrianDefense manufacturingInference optimizationNaïveserverless runtimemodel routerautomated factoriesOmilia

Questions this episode answers

What does Naïve's API actually automate when setting up a business?

Naïve's API orchestrates LLC formation (with state and industry code selection), email inbox setup, virtual card provisioning, phone numbers, databases, computing resources, and integrations with Stripe and QuickBooks - with KYC/KYB and payments still requiring human involvement but the rest automatable by AI agents.

How does Omilia differentiate from AI-first competitors like Sierra and Decagon?

Omilia uses targeted automation: simple rule-based logic for routine queries like account balance checks, and deploys large language models only for complex issues that truly require AI, resulting in better unit economics and ROI for both the company and its customers.

What is Hadrian's business model in defense tech?

Hadrian builds automated manufacturing facilities that mass-produce parts for existing military vehicles and submarines, such as its $2.4B public-private partnership facility in Alabama, rather than developing AI-powered weapons.

What infrastructure projects is Naïve building with Series A funding?

Naïve is developing virtualized sandboxes for agents, model routing and inference optimization, a memory layer for storing business context, and governance and orchestration tools to manage agent behavior and costs.

What is driving the fastest growth in Naïve's business today?

While autonomous company setup is in most demand, inference and serverless agents - infrastructure to reduce the cost of running large numbers of agents - is the fastest-growing revenue segment according to CEO Sean Dorjee.

What our scoring noted

Our reviewer’s read on each dimension, with quotes from the episode.

Insight Density

9 / 20

The episode covers three companies with factual details about business models and metrics, but lacks substantive exploration of underlying business principles or strategic insights. Most content is straightforward reporting of funding announcements and product features with minimal analysis of why these approaches matter or what operators should learn.

Naive has scaled annual run rate revenue by 10x to the low double digit millions over the past six months.
Omelia itself has expanded its operations to building self learning agents that can work across different customer contact points.

Originality

7 / 20

The episode recycles well-worn frameworks - automation reducing costs, AI replacing grunt work, enterprise sales models - without novel perspective or contrarian takes. The Omilia positioning about avoiding LLMs for simple queries is the closest to originality, but it's presented as a brief differentiator rather than explored as a first-principles argument.

Developers detest Drudgery the entire field of programming is proof of how hard people will work to automate away the boring tasks.
You may have a bazooka, but if your enemy is near you, you need a knife. This is the reality of the contact center where you need multiple tools.

Guest Caliber

12 / 20

The episode features Sean Dorji (CEO of Naive) and Dimitris Vasos (CEO of Omilia), both practitioners running substantial operations with real revenue and customers. However, the speaker time is limited and both are primarily providing surface-level narrative rather than deep operational insight. No technical founders or engineering leads to dig into product decisions.

CEO and co founder Sean Dorji.
The company's CEO, Dimitris Vasos, says that a large proportion of incoming customer support queries involve basic information such as account balances.

Specificity & Evidence

13 / 20

The episode includes concrete metrics - Naive's 30,000 developer customers, 10x ARR growth in six months, Hadrian's $1.37B raise at $7.87B valuation, Omilia's $67M Series B and $60M ARR, Taco Bell across 1,000+ outlets, and four named defense tech customers. However, evidence is mostly funding and business size rather than operational specifics; limited detail on unit economics, CAC, or technical trade-offs.

signed up over 30,000 developer customers within months of its launch.
Naive has scaled annual run rate revenue by 10x to the low double digit millions over the past six months.

Conversational Craft

6 / 20

This is a news brief, not a conversational interview. The host provides zero questions, follow-ups, or pushback. Content is purely narrated summary without dialogue, disagreement, or probing into the claims made. No opportunity to test assumptions or challenge the founders' positioning.

That's all for now. For the latest in startup tech news, go to techcrunch.com.
[The entire transcript is monologue with zero back-and-forth conversation.]

Conversation analysis

Computed from the transcript - who did the talking, and the words that came up most.

Most-used words

agents17framer11naive10building8customer7capital7infrastructure6running6revenue6website5customers5businesses5large5billion5tasks4numbers4

Episode notes

-Taking vibe-coding a step further, Naive claims its infra can automate most of the work in setting up and running a business. -Defense tech Hadrian raises $1.37B at $8B valuation -Athens-based Omilia, which has been working on automating voice calls and customer support since 2002, throwing AI at every process can be wasteful. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Full transcript

12 min

Transcribed and scored by The B2B Podcast Index.

Speaker A: This is techcrunch. This episode is brought to you by Framer. So let's say that you want a new landing page for your website, but instead of handing the work off and waiting for someone to get it done, let Framer help you. With Framer you can move faster. You'll work alongside agents that solve the gap between AI generated ideas and a production ready website. Together you can streamline collaboration on the same canvas, build custom code components, create and manage CMS content, optimize SEO settings and ship everything all in one place. Framer is a complete website platform, not just a builder where your changes take minutes, not days. For me it was super easy. I went from idea to live website quicker than I could have ever dreamed. I don't know how to design things, but with Framer I didn't need to. Their options are great. So many cool layouts to choose from. Lots. Let Framer make your life easier by building a website you'll love and fits your needs. Want to check it out for yourself? Learn how you can get more out of your site from a Framer specialist, or get started building for free today@framer.com tcstartups for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com tcstartups For 30% off framer.com tcstartups rules and restrictions may apply Developers detest Drudgery the entire field of programming is proof of how hard people will work to automate away the boring tasks involved in building things. And as Vibe coding has proved, they've even managed to find ways to not do most of the work of putting products together. So it's not a, uh, big surprise to hear that Naive, which offers infrastructure that lets AI agents take on the bulk of the work involved in running a business, had signed up over 30,000 developer customers within months of its launch. Taking Vibe Coding a step further, the startup claims its infra can automate most of the work in setting up and running a business, provided you supply the AI agents and the required token budget. Of course, it packages the process of assembling payments, email accounts, phone numbers, cloud infrastructure, storage and company incorporation behind a single API. Naive supplies a prompt that developers can provide to tools like Cursor, Claude code or Codex, which can connect to the company's API to provision the infrastructure to set up a business, it lets an agent orchestrate the formation of a US llc, supplying details such as the state, industry code, business description and proposed names, though users are still required to be involved to complete KYC and KYB processes and make make any required payments. The rest of the setup can be done by your AI agents, including setting up email inboxes, virtual cards, phone numbers, databases, computing resources and connections to services such as Stripe and QuickBooks. A governance layer promises to help users set budgets, restrict their agents capabilities, and require human approval before sensitive actions are carried out. The company also provides templates for businesses such as AI SEO, full stack, SaaS, apps, recruiting, accounting, customer support, and even a mobile emulator with which agents can operate smartphone apps on emulated devices. The allure of such automation has clearly resonated, as evidenced by the user figure mentioned above, and Naive has scaled annual run rate revenue by 10x to the low double digit millions over the past six months. That's according to CEO and co founder Sean Dorji. Uh, Dorjee told TechCrunch that his customers are using Naive to run autonomous businesses such as AI automation agencies, faceless online content channels on TikTok and YouTube, and even a rental car agency. In one case, he discovered Naive's infrastructure supporting a TikTok channel that posted AI generated videos of cats and dogs dancing and boxing. I think the one that's growing the fastest right now is AI automation agencies. The first business that a lot of people start is genuinely just selling agents to other small businesses. We have some customers who run an entire rental car agency autonomously, but this toolkit for running businesses may only be part of Naive's opportunity. Using AI to automate everything sounds great, but the cost of keeping agents running can grow as astronomical as they call expensive AI models pass large amounts of context between tasks and consume resources while sitting idle. Naive is using some of the new capital to develop infrastructure that it says can make those agent loops more efficient. It's building a model router to send queries to the most efficient model for a task, while preserving and replaying already reasoned data a memory system that stores and services business context as needed by agents to do their tasks, and an orchestrator for dividing work among agents. Notably, Naive is also building a serverless runtime that runs agents within lightweight JavaScript environments, rather than assigning each one a complete virtual machine, an approach that lets customers pay primarily when an agent is active and and makes it less expensive to deploy large numbers of agents. While the autonomous company toolkit is in the most demand today, Dorji said. Optimizing inference costs is one of its fastest growing sources of demand, he said. Part of running an autonomous company and running agents like that's your biggest cost line now, and so the highest growing demand right now, I would say is for Inference and serverless agents. He added that part of the business is getting interest from enterprises, though he did not name any that could prove to be a more valuable business than helping founders automatically set up phone numbers and corporate cards. Developers may initially use Naive to deal with the tedium of setting up a company, but as they grow they may care more about whether it can meaningfully reduce the recurring cost of operating a horde of agents. Enterprises with established businesses may find something to care about on that front as well. Naive currently has 10 full time employees, Dorje said. Proceeds from the Series A will be used to hire researchers and develop the company's four infrastructure projects, which are virtualized sandboxes for agents, model routing and inference optimization, a memory layer and governance and orchestration. Hadrian, a defense tech company, announced on Thursday that it had raised a fresh $1.37 billion round at a valuation of $7.87 billion from a mile long list of well known investors. The lead investors in the round include WCM, UM Investment Management, Washington Harbor Partners, Valor Equity Partners, 137 Ventures and Baillie Gifford. Participating investors include 1789 Capital, Morgan Stanley Wealth Management funds managed by Apollo and T Rowe Price, as well as Andreessen Horowitz, Founders Fund, Lux Capital, Altimeter and others. Founders Fund and Lux led the company's $260 million Series C financing about a year ago, bringing the total raised to date to around $2 billion. That's according to Pitchbook estimates. Hadrian is an interesting defense tech in that it's not build new AI powered weapons. The company is building automated manufacturing facilities that will mass produce parts for the vehicles that the military complex already relies on. Uh, for instance, in March, Hadrian opened a facility in Alabama to mass produce parts for submarines, making that its fourth facility. The deal for that facility, structured as a public private partnership, was valued at $2.4 billion. The customer support industry has seen a massive influx of startups like Sierra, Decagon and Parloa uh trying to infuse AI into automating customer calls, chat and messages so companies can handle more queries at scale. But according to Athens based Omelia, which has been working on automating voice calls and customer support since 2002, throwing AI at every process can be wasteful. The company's CEO, Dimitris Vasos, says that a large proportion of incoming customer support queries involve basic information such as account balances, and there's little need to deploy large language models for such tasks. He said we will use any available weapon to win the battle. For customer service companies like Sierra decagon, they identify as generative AI companies. Their sole purpose is to deploy generative AI and limit themselves. You may have a bazooka, but if your enemy is near you, you need a knife. This is the reality of the contact center where you need multiple tools. Omelia itself has expanded its operations to building self learning agents that can work across different customer contact points. To build that out, the company has now raised a $67 million Series B led by Expedition Growth Capital. This round is the company's second time raising capital after it raised $20 million from Grafton Capital back in 2020. Since then, it has managed to increase its annual recurring revenue by 10x to $60 million. Vasos says Amelia's key differentiation lies in having great unit economics for both itself and and its customers, and thanks to this approach it has not needed large cash infusions as compared to its competitors, he said. In the next few years we will see the companies that can offer real return on investment prevail. We don't mind that we're not as sexy as Elevenlabs and Sierra on LinkedIn. Right now we care about growing steadily and building the foundations for a billion dollar revenue company in the next three years. Omelia's clients include Capital One, Discover, rbc, DWP and pseg, and Vasos said quick service restaurants that have adopted voice based ordering are now a big focus. The company already has Taco Bell as a client and has deployed its tech across more than 1,000 outlets. Vasos said that it is in talks with two more quick service restaurants in the U.S. omelia will use the fresh cash to open a new office in the US a market that accounts for a significant chunk of its revenue. It will also bolster its go to market team and is hiring a Chief Revenue Officer, Chief Marketing Officer and a VP of Revenue Operations. The company has around 500 employees at the moment and expects its headcount to reach 600 by the end of the year. That's all for now. For the latest in startup tech news, go to techcrunch.com it.

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