Cowboy, a New York startup building a marketplace for buying and selling AI agents, came out of stealth on 4 November 2026 with a $5m seed round. Dealroom and Upstarts Media both reported the funding alongside the launch of its store, called The General Store, which opened with 100 agents.
Nebular, Compound, Semantic Ventures, Anagram and Shine Ventures invested, along with angels Aashay Sanghvi and Kevin Kwok. Neither report names a lead investor or a valuation. The company was incubated at Uncommon Projects, a fund of former Snapchat managers that includes chief executive Chad DePue.
“I cannot imagine a world where the two or three biggest app platforms won't eventually use your data to sell you things”Chad DePue, CEO, Cowboy
What Cowboy does
The General Store is aimed at developers who want to earn money from AI agents and at users who want to run them. According to Upstarts Media, buyers run locally hosted versions of the tools, and those tools do not send credentials back to the creator. Sellers can charge for an agent without handing over their source code or setting up their own payments.
Cowboy provides the compute and takes a cut of sales and of compute costs, Upstarts reported. It plans to let users bring their own compute and to add subscription and usage-based pricing. Agents can be reached through a command-line tool, Slack or Telegram. Payouts currently run in dollars through Stripe.
At launch the company also offered 10,000 data feeds for developers and a test version of Cowboy Chain, a blockchain-based payments network that it plans to launch in the coming months. It uses an open-source tool called Cowchat, which lets agents communicate with each other, internally.
Who is behind it
DePue previously held engineering leadership roles at Whisper, Snap and Uniswap, according to Upstarts. Ryan Chan is head of product. Cowboy has a team of 10 in New York, and the company was founded in 2025.
DePue told Upstarts that the company is focused for now on giving developers a way to make money with AI. The first customers it is targeting are traders, particularly in crypto, who want agents to manage their positions and may pay up to hundreds of dollars a month, Upstarts reported.
DePue told Upstarts that an early version of the product was fragile, and that he did not want it running on a Mac Mini in a closet. Upstarts reported that Cowboy provides the compute for agents on the store.
The case for an independent store
DePue argued that big app platforms are unlikely to leave user data alone. Cowboy's pitch is a marketplace that those platforms do not control, with agents that run on the buyer's side.
Dealroom's analysis noted the obstacles. Cowboy has to attract buyers and sellers at the same time, and its scale is modest next to Google's enterprise marketplace for agents and a $50m raise by AIR, a rival it named. The company did not give a use of funds or any revenue figures.
Company website: cowboy.inc