Hone Launches AI-Agent Platform With $60 Million Seed Round

San Francisco startup Hone launched publicly Oct. 8 with a $60 million seed round to develop AI systems that pursue business goals over weeks or months instead of completing isolated tasks.

The round was led by Benchmark and Index Ventures. Hone calls its products “Engines,” which are designed to continue working after an initial interaction and focus on outcomes such as customer retention, lead conversion, vendor management, credit risk, product adoption and operations.

The systems can examine an organization’s workflows, history, people and operating constraints before determining which actions to take. They are also designed to test proposed actions against past work and improve through feedback and observed results.

“At Hone, we enable organizations to direct AI at their most complex business problems: AI that owns outcomes over weeks and months, not tasks,” CEO Moritz Stephan said.

Hone’s systems can work through Slack, Microsoft Teams and email. Actions are logged, policies can be configured and sensitive activity can require approval. Hone says customer data is not used to train models, while its execution environment is sandboxed and protected with encryption in transit and at rest.

The company’s approach places it between conventional chatbots and task-oriented AI agents. Instead of receiving a single assignment, an Engine is given an organizational goal and determines the work needed to pursue it over an extended period.

Stephan previously worked at Cognition, where he helped develop the planning-and-execution system behind Devin, the company’s AI software engineer. He later served as Cognition’s chief of staff.

Oliver Brady and Carlo Kobe are also Hone co-founders. Brady previously worked at Harvey and Mercor, while Kobe co-founded Fizz with Stephan.

Hone says its team includes former founders and early contributors from OpenAI, Cognition, Mercor and Ramp. The company is based in San Francisco.

“We’ve raised a $60 million seed round from Benchmark and Index to build them,” Hone said in its launch announcement.