Cowboy Raises $5 Million in Seed Funding to Help Developers Own, Control and Monetize AI

Cowboy releases private, secure, and scalable operating system for agents

NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Cowboy, the app store for AI, today emerged from stealth with $5 million in funding and announced a platform that lets developers own, control, and monetize AI, with more than 10,000 agents, data feeds, skills, and models available in the Cowboy General Store. The round included 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.

CEO and founder Chad DePue founded Cowboy in 2025 after realizing the internet was on the verge of its next App Store moment with AI. The open question was where developers would build, share, and earn from the agents, data, compute, and skills they create. Cowboy has built a new operating system from first principles, with its own file system, secret store, and message queue, enabling developers to easily ship and scale their work to billions of users. Long-term, it will run on a distributed compute network designed for data sovereignty and privacy, powered by the Cowboy protocol, which runs on its own, forever.

The State of Agents

While building and using agents has become mainstream in just the last few months, no place has emerged to run and house them securely. Every agent on the market today puts one person in conversation with one agent, and those agents cannot be hired, cannot hold assets, cannot work together, and stop working the moment a laptop closes. A developer who builds something genuinely useful has nowhere to house it efficiently and no way to make money from it.

“With the recent cybersecurity threats emerging from agentic swarms, we need a platform that is designed from first principles for AI agents to reason, communicate, and store data securely,” said Chad DePue, CEO and founder of Cowboy. “In addition, a new ecosystem of tools is emerging from agents, much like apps emerged for the iPhone. 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. Cowboy has built the marketplace where developers can build, run, and sell their agents.”

How Agents on Cowboy Work

The magic of Cowboy is that when someone hires an agent from the General Store, they get their own private copy running in an isolated sandbox. They never see the developer’s code, neither side sees the other’s data, and the developer gets paid for what they’ve built. This provides a level of trust and safety which doesn’t exist anywhere else on the internet.

Cowboy agents are:

• Easy to create and deploy: Standing up an autonomous agent normally means a server, credentials, a database, and a monitoring stack. On Cowboy, developers can build and ship agents from scratch in 1-2 minutes, and Cowboy handles maintenance and monitoring for any agent a developer can imagine.
• Lightweight: Agents are inexpensive to run on Cowboy. They can schedule future work, hold credentials, store files, publish live websites, and chat with each other.
• Private and secure: Cowboy agents are reviewed for security vulnerabilities and use private data stores that no one—not even Cowboy—can access.
• Alive and kicking: Cowboy agents run on their own—they schedule themselves, communicate with each other over private chat, and with humans via Telegram, iMessage, Slack, and Discord.
• Easy to discover: The Cowboy General Store is where developers list and hire agents, data feeds, skills, compute, and more. Instead of rebuilding a tool that already exists, a developer can hire the one that does the job, and that agent can hire additional agents.
• Built to earn: Developers can build agents, skills, models, compute, and data feeds that other people pay to use, and list them in the Cowboy General Store.
• Owned by their creators: Developers keep their data and their models. Cowboy does not train on what runs on the platform.

About the Cowboy General Store

The General Store opens today with more than 100 agents and 10,000 data feeds for hire. Some agents are built for traders: agents that run strategies on Hyperliquid, copy top-ranked traders on Polymarket, and watch markets and alert their owners when prices move. Other agents available handle everyday work, from PDF rendering to personal assistance. Developers can also list feeds, models, and skills.

“The economic model for people creating agentic tools has never been clear. With Cowboy, developers have a way to earn based on what they’ve built, and to find and share new agentic tools,” said Finn Murphy, General Partner at Nebular. “This is a team that has previously built a massive developer platform at scale, and they are now building a new economy that developers own. That is what we’ve invested in.”

Cowboy Cloud and the General Store are available now. Developers can build, deploy, and sell agents today at cowboy.inc. The Cowboy Chain testnet is also open, giving developers an early look at the network ahead of its mainnet launch later this fall. To start building on Cowboy or view the tools available in the General Store, visit cowboy.inc.

About Cowboy

Cowboy is the app store for agents, a platform for developers to own, control, and monetize AI agents. Developers deploy agents that run permanently, hold their own credentials and files, transact with other agents, and can be listed for hire in the Cowboy General Store. Cowboy was founded in 2025 by Chad DePue and venture fund Uncommon Projects, and is based in New York. For more information, visit cowboy.inc.