Ex-OpenAI and Cognition Alumni Raise $60M to Build AI That Runs Entire Business Functions

A five-month-old startup called Hone has emerged from stealth with a $60 million seed round, valuing the company at $285 million, to build AI agents capable of autonomously managing long-running business functions over weeks or months. The round was led by Benchmark and Index Ventures, two of Silicon Valley's most prominent firms, signaling serious institutional confidence in the concept.

Hone is led by Moritz Stephan, formerly chief of staff at Cognition AI — the fast-growing AI coding startup — and draws on talent from OpenAI and Cognition. The company's pitch goes beyond narrow task automation: rather than building point solutions like a lead-scoring tool for sales teams, Hone wants to deploy what it calls 'engines' — autonomous AI systems that take ownership of entire business outcomes, check in with humans when needed, and manage goals and responsibilities across a function proactively.

Index partner Shardul Shah, joining Hone's board, framed the ambition explicitly: what Cognition has done for software development, Hone aims to do for every other department in a company — finance, sales, operations, marketing. Benchmark partner Peter Fenton, also joining the board, acknowledged the security risks that come with agentic AI and said guardrails are a core part of Hone's development, particularly given a recent wave of high-profile incidents involving AI tools behaving unexpectedly.

Hone's early customers include Cognition itself and Modal, an AI inference startup. Cognition is using Hone agents to power its go-to-market operations as it scales rapidly. Cognition CEO Scott Wu is also a personal investor in Hone, deepening the ties between the two companies. The startup's emergence puts it squarely in a crowded but fast-moving race to capture enterprise spending on agentic AI — one of the hottest and most contested categories in tech right now.