Cowboy raises $5 million to launch marketplace for autonomous AI agents

Emerging from stealth

Cowboy, a New York-based startup, recently entered the public market after securing $5 million in seed funding. The company was founded in 2025 by CEO Chad DePue in partnership with the venture fund Uncommon Projects. This funding round included backing from several firms, including Nebular, Compound, Semantic Ventures, Anagram, Shine Ventures, and Uncommon Projects.

The investment also drew interest from a variety of angel investors with deep technical backgrounds. These include the senior vice president of engineering at Function Health, the co-founder and chief technology officer of Dune Analytics, and several other prominent figures in the tech space. The capital is intended to support the growth of a new ecosystem for autonomous AI agents.

The startup is positioning itself as a primary infrastructure provider for the next wave of AI development. By providing a marketplace and cloud platform, Cowboy aims to bridge the gap between creating an AI tool and actually making it useful for a paying audience. The company is focusing on the economic model of how these tools can be shared and monetized effectively.

The Cowboy General Store

The centerpiece of the launch is the Cowboy General Store, a marketplace where developers can offer various AI-driven services. This includes not just the agents themselves, but also data feeds, models, computing resources, and specific software skills. The platform debuted with more than 100 agents and 10,000 data feeds ready for users to hire and utilize.

Current offerings on the marketplace range from specialized financial tools to general personal assistance. For example, some agents are designed to monitor financial markets, execute trading strategies on Hyperliquid, or track activity on Polymarket. Other agents focus on more routine tasks, such as processing PDF documents or providing general administrative help to users.

The marketplace is designed to be a one-stop shop for the agentic economy. Developers can list their creations for paid use, while customers can browse for specific capabilities to solve their problems. This structure allows for a diverse range of applications to emerge, from high-frequency trading alerts to simple personal productivity aids.

Infrastructure and privacy

One of the primary technical hurdles for AI agents is maintaining security while allowing for functionality. Cowboy addresses this by letting customers run private copies of agents in isolated computing environments. This setup ensures that the underlying code of the developer remains separate from the private data of the customer.

The platform provides a complete suite of backend services so that developers do not have to manage the heavy lifting of infrastructure. This includes built-in file storage, credential management, and messaging systems. Developers can deploy their agents without having to separately configure complex databases, servers, or monitoring systems from scratch.

Because of this streamlined approach, Cowboy claims that basic agents can be created and launched in just one to two minutes. These agents are capable of operating continuously, scheduling various tasks, and communicating with other agents. They can also interact with users through popular messaging apps like Telegram, iMessage, Slack, and Discord.

Security and data sovereignty

Cowboy emphasizes a security-first approach to handle the risks associated with autonomous AI systems. The company reviews agents for potential security vulnerabilities and maintains private data stores for its users. Importantly, the company states that it does not use the models or data provided by developers to train its own internal systems.

CEO Chad DePue noted that the platform is designed to handle the risks of agentic swarms. He stated that the platform is designed for agents to reason and communicate securely. This focus on security is intended to build trust with enterprise and individual users alike.

Looking forward, the company is also working on a distributed computing network to support data sovereignty and privacy. This project is currently in the testnet phase under the name Cowboy Chain. The company plans to launch the mainnet for this network later this fall to further expand its infrastructure capabilities.

A new commercial model

The launch of Cowboy represents a shift toward a clearer economic model for the AI industry. Finn Murphy, a general partner at Nebular, highlighted that the way people earn money from creating autonomous tools has historically been unclear. Cowboy aims to solve this by providing a dedicated space for developers to find and share their tools.

By providing a marketplace, Cowboy allows developers to earn based on the specific value of what they have built. This creates a feedback loop where developers are incentivized to create high-quality, reliable agents that solve real-world problems. It also provides a discovery mechanism for users who may not know how to build their own custom tools.

The Cowboy Cloud and the Cowboy General Store are currently available for public use. These tools allow the community to begin building, operating, and selling AI agents immediately. The startup is positioning itself as the foundational layer for a future where AI agents are a standard part of the digital economy.