Agents have exploded this year – you probably have one. Maybe it triages your emails, fixes bugs, or watches markets for you while you sleep. You’ve likely started building skills and tweaking plugins to create the perfect agents for your specific needs.
Then comes the harder question: where do I put it now, and how can I get paid for it?
I hit that wall myself. Last year I built a handful of agents for my own use, and they were some of the best software I’d ever written. But they had nowhere to live, and I had no way to share them. The agents stopped when I closed my laptop. They kept my API keys in config files. If I wanted one to stay up, I rented a server and became its landlord. And if another developer wanted to use one, there was no way to hand it over without handing over the code, and neither of us could get paid.
Building an agent is no longer the hard part. What’s still missing is everything devs need to take their creations a step further: a place to run them and somewhere to share and sell them without giving away what’s under the hood. As agents have become mainstream, no place has emerged to run and host them securely. Right now, a developer who builds something genuinely useful has nowhere to host it efficiently and no way to monetize it.
Crypto solved half of this years ago by creating sovereign software nobody can turn off, but that software can’t do much beyond move money; it can’t browse the web, keep a secret, hold real data, or think. AI solved the other half: building software that can do almost anything, but only on someone else’s servers and under someone else’s terms. An agent needs both AI's capability and crypto's permanence to be autonomous.
Cowboy is the app store for AI agents. Build your agent, run it, and then list it in the General Store. When someone hires your agent, they get their own private copy running in an isolated sandbox. They never see your code, neither of you sees each other’s data, and you get paid for what you’ve created.
And it’s not just agents. You can sell the things agents need, too: data feeds, skills, compute, and fine-tuned models. We’re launching with more than 100 available agents for hire, from agents that trade on Hyperliquid and Polymarket to agents built for everyday work – and with more than 10,000 data feeds, from market prices to SEC filings. Charge a subscription or per-use fee; we handle payments and refunds. The people who’ve contributed to open-source agents have never made a dime from that work. On Cowboy, everyone who creates value gets paid.
We’re not trying to build every agent ourselves. Many companies want to dominate every vertical and ship their own software in every category. We are providing developers the primitives to build, run, and list agents, and we’ll stay out of their way. The breakout agents of the next few years probably won’t be ours, and that’s the point.
Our job is to make deploying an agent as easy as sending a tweet. Cowboy handles the hard parts: keeping your agent running and connecting it to files, chat, payments, and users. You decide what to build and how to make money from it. We won’t constrain what you make, and we’ll support you however you need to succeed.
Our ambition is to support a million developers running a billion agents. Soon, there will be more agents than people, and there aren’t billions of servers to run them. But agents spend most of their time waiting, so Cowboy runs them on a shared runtime where an idle agent costs almost nothing. We’re starting with Cowboy Cloud. Over time, we’ll open the network so anyone can bring their own compute, because that’s how you build something big enough to hold a billion agents.
Today, Cowboy Cloud and the Cowboy General Store are live. You can sign in with Google, pay with a card, and we run the compute for you. The Cowboy Chain testnet is also live today, so you can try it before the mainnet launches later this fall.
We’ve raised $5 million in seed funding from Nebular, Compound, Semantic Ventures, Anagram, Shine Ventures, Uncommon Projects, along with angel investors Farnaz Azmoodeh, SVP of engineering at Function Health; Mats Olsen, co-founder and chief technology officer of Dune Analytics; Aashay Sanghvi; Kevin Kwok; James Smits; and Ian Lapham, among others.
Two companies shouldn’t own all of your data, compute, and intelligence. The agents you build should belong to you.
Build it, own it, and get paid for it. See you on Cowboy.
— Chad DePue