Today we're announcing Inkbox's $5.3M seed round, led by Peak XV, with participation from Pioneer Fund, Y Combinator, and others. Our angel investors include Guillermo Rauch (CEO of Vercel), Henri Stern (CEO of Privy), Jonathan Frankle (Chief AI Scientist of Databricks), Cristina Cordova (COO of Linear), and Dan Levine (Partner at Accel).
We're also launching a new product.
Inkbox already gives AI agents persistent identities, with their own email, phone, iMessage, and WhatsApp. Starting today, we also run the agent.
Sending is easy. Listening is hard.
Any agent can send an email with one API call. But replies don't arrive on your schedule. The answer might come back an hour later or the next morning, and by then your agent might not be running.
You could keep the agent online around the clock just in case, and pay for every hour it sits idle. Or you could build your own servers, webhooks, and wake-up logic just to make sure no reply goes unanswered.
Either way, you're spending time and money on plumbing instead of on what your agent actually does.
Hosted agents
Now you can run an agent on Inkbox, right next to its communication channels. Pick an agent harness and give it instructions. It gets its own cloud computer, tied to its Inkbox identity.
- It never misses a message. Every email, text, iMessage, WhatsApp, or Slack message it's set to handle wakes it up, even if it's asleep.
- It sleeps when idle. When it has nothing to do, it goes to sleep and keeps its files, history, and scheduled jobs, so it picks up right where it left off.
- It works on a schedule. Give it a prompt or a script to run once, on an interval, or on a cron schedule, and it wakes up to do the job.
- It has a real computer. Open a terminal, install packages, set environment variables, and work with its files. Everything stays on its disk between sessions.
- You can talk to it directly. Chat with your agent, send it files, and see the conversations it has had with people over its channels.
You stay in control of what it can access and who it can talk to. You decide which events wake it. In chat, it asks before using a tool unless you let it go ahead on its own. Its access is scoped to its own identity, so it can act as itself without acting as the rest of your workspace. The contact rules you already set on an identity still apply, so a hosted agent only talks to the people you've allowed.
Put together, an agent on Inkbox now has everything it needs to work on its own: an identity with email, phone, iMessage, WhatsApp, Slack, and agent-to-agent messaging, plus its own computer.
Coming soon: sandboxes, so agents you run yourself can use a cloud computer from Inkbox to run code, keep files, and serve apps.
Four months in
Since our YC launch four months ago, we've processed millions of messages for AI agents. Thank you to the tens of thousands of users who have given an agent an Inkbox identity.
Spin up a hosted agent today and give it an identity in the Inkbox Console.