How Locus runs AI cofounders that build entire businesses

Starting a business has always meant getting other people involved. You needed someone to build the product and someone to go sell it, which is usually expensive and adds up quickly. That requirement is one of the main reasons most people never start a business.

AI is in the middle of removing it. The part everyone fixates on is the assistant, which helps you work faster. The part that actually changes things is the agent that does the work itself. You point it at an idea, and it does the jobs that used to need a hire. Once that is true, the cost of starting a business falls toward nothing, and it opens up to people who were never going to raise a round or put a team together.

People are already building agents that would read like science fiction to anyone from the nineties. One agent writes working software from a sentence. Another agent researches a topic for an hour and comes back with something you can use. Plenty of them will sit at a computer and click through whatever you put in front of them.

Almost all of that work is aimed at the same skill, making the agent a good operator, something that takes a task and finishes it. That is real, and that is hard. It is also not the same thing as running a business. An operator does what it is told. A business has to decide what is worth doing and then make more money than it spends doing it. Far fewer people are building for that, and it is the part that turns an agent into something you would actually call a co-founder.

The clearest place to see the difference is e-commerce, because a store is the whole job in one place. You put up a site and get an offer in front of people. You answer the ones who write back and chase down the supplier on the other end. You take the money when someone buys, and then you do it again the next day. None of those steps is much on its own. Holding all of them together, for something that has to keep running and keep making money, is the actual work. That is the bar a co-founder has to clear, and it has mostly been left alone.

That gap is what Locus set out to close. Locus, a Y Combinator company, was built by Cole Dermott, an engineer and entrepreneur who wanted an agent that could run a business rather than just help with one. The product is called Locus Founder, and has two sides that turn out to be the same thing. On one, it works as a co-founder: you describe a business to it in a chat, and it stands up a working version. Locus Founder builds the storefront, sources or creates the product, generates and publishes the ads, and runs an entire automated growth stack for the business. On the other hand, it handles the money. Every agent gets a wallet it controls, USDC on Base, with user-set spending limits, approval thresholds, a list of vendors it is allowed to pay, and a record of everything it spends. The agent can also reach over forty other services that it might need, all paid from one central wallet.

None of that starts with the selling, though. It starts with the agent being someone that the outside world can interact with. To run a store, an agent has to show up as itself. It cold-emails a supplier and waits for a reply. A customer writes in, and it has to answer. It signs up for some tool and has to click the verification link to get in. That only works if the inbox and the identity are the agent's own, not the founder's personal Gmail, and not a real person's name borrowed for the job. Locus Founder runs a fleet of these agents, and each one gets its inbox from AgentMail. AgentMail is also one of the endpoints in Locus's own catalog, so an agent can set up its inbox and pay for it out of the same wallet it uses for everything else. Locus Founder runs the business and moves the money, AgentMail gives the agent an identity and a way to be reached.

What you are left with is an agent you can point at a business and walk away from. It runs the business and pays for what it needs, inside the limits you give it.

"An agent can only do real work if the world can tell who it's dealing with. It needs its own handle, separate from our users, so no one's confused about whether they're talking to a person or a process. AgentMail gives the agentic stack we use for Locus Founder this identity out of the box. Our agents can now run cold outbound and distribution at scale, without a single action from our users."

Cole Dermott, CEO and founder of Locus

If you want to wire up the same pieces, both sides take a few minutes.

For the wallet and the payments, named Pay With Locus, you sign up at app.paywithlocus.com, create a wallet on Base, fund it with USDC, and set the spending limits. Then you hand your agent the skill file, and it takes over from there:

Read https://paywithlocus.com/SKILL.md and follow the instructions to set up Locus

Check the balance to confirm it is live:

curl https://api.paywithlocus.com/api/pay/balance \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_LOCUS_API_KEY"

For the identity and the inbox, AgentMail. An agent can register itself against a human email and get back a key and its first inbox:

npm install -g agentmail-cli
agentmail agent sign-up --human-email you@example.com --username my-agent

After that, it creates inboxes and sends mail on its own:

from agentmail import AgentMail

client = AgentMail(api_key="am_...")

inbox = client.inboxes.create()
client.inboxes.messages.send(
    inbox.inbox_id,
    to="supplier@example.com",
    subject="Quote request",
    text="Hi, checking lead times on a reorder.",
)

To start building with Locus Founder's AI co-founder, go to locusfounder.com.

If you are building agents or selling AI employees of your own, we would like to give you three months of AgentMail free through our startup program. Apply at agentmail.to/startups.