Cowboy has emerged from stealth with $5 million in seed funding and a marketplace for AI agents. The New York startup calls the marketplace the General Store, and it lets developers build, list and sell agents, data feeds, skills and models.
What the General Store sells
The store opened with more than 100 agents and 10,000 data feeds available for hire. Some agents are built for traders, including tools that run strategies, copy ranked traders and watch markets for price moves. Others handle everyday work such as rendering documents and personal assistance.
When a buyer hires an agent, they receive a private copy that runs in an isolated sandbox. The buyer never sees the developer code, and the developer never sees the buyer data. Cowboy says this separation is meant to build trust between strangers who trade software.
How developers earn
Developers can list agents, skills, models, compute and data feeds in the store. Buyers can pay through monthly hires, per use fees, one time purchases or hires by other agents. Cowboy says it reviews every store actor for security before approval.
Cowboy also says its agents can schedule work, hold credentials, store files and publish websites. They can talk to people through Telegram, iMessage, Slack and Discord. The company says agents keep running after a laptop closes, as long as they still have funds.
Who backed the round
The seed round included Nebular, Compound, Semantic Ventures, Anagram, Shine Ventures and Uncommon Projects. Angel investors also joined, including Farnaz Azmoodeh of Function Health and Mats Olsen of Dune Analytics. The funding will support the platform and its marketplace.
Cowboy was founded in 2025 by chief executive Chad DePue and venture fund Uncommon Projects. DePue previously held engineering roles at Whisper, Snap and Uniswap. The startup is based in New York and has a team of 10 people.
“Agents will do a huge amount of the world’s work, but it remains unclear who owns them, who controls and secures them, and who gets paid when they work,” said Chad DePue, chief executive and founder of Cowboy.
What comes next
Cowboy has also opened a test version of Cowboy Chain, a network for payments between agents. The company plans a mainnet launch later this fall. For now, the General Store and Cowboy Cloud are available to developers.
The challenge for Cowboy is building demand on both sides of a marketplace. Developers need buyers, and buyers need agents worth paying for. The company is starting with traders, where a useful agent can show a clear financial return.
