Image credit: Cowboy.
Cowboy announced $5M in funding on November 4, 2026, as it emerged from stealth. The company calls itself the app store for AI and has launched a platform where developers can own, control, and monetize AI agents. The round included Nebular, Compound, Semantic Ventures, Anagram, Shine Ventures, and Uncommon Projects. Angel investors include Farnaz Azmoodeh of Function Health, Mats Olsen of Dune Analytics, Aashay Sanghvi, Kevin Kwok, James Smits, and Ian Lapham.
Chad DePue founded Cowboy in 2025 together with venture fund Uncommon Projects. According to the company, he started it after concluding that the internet was heading toward its next App Store moment with AI, and that the open question was where developers would build, share, and earn from their agents.
Cowboy says it built an operating system from first principles, with its own file system, secret store, and message queue. Over the long term, it plans to run on a distributed compute network designed for data sovereignty and privacy, powered by the Cowboy protocol.
The company describes the problem this way. Today’s agents typically put one person in conversation with one agent. They can’t be hired, can’t hold assets, can’t work together, and stop when a laptop closes. A developer who builds something useful has little place to host it and no easy way to earn from it.
The marketplace is called the Cowboy General Store. When someone hires an agent from it, they get a private copy running in an isolated sandbox. The buyer never sees the developer’s code, neither side sees the other’s data, and the developer is paid. Cowboy says agents can schedule future work, hold credentials, store files, publish live websites, and message each other. They can also reach humans through Telegram, iMessage, Slack, and Discord. The company says it reviews agents for security vulnerabilities, that its private data stores are inaccessible even to Cowboy, and that it doesn’t train on what runs on the platform.
The General Store opens with more than 100 agents and 10,000 data feeds. Examples include trading agents that run strategies on Hyperliquid or copy top-ranked traders on Polymarket, alongside agents for PDF rendering and personal assistance. Developers can also list models, skills, and compute.
DePue said the recent cybersecurity threats from agentic swarms call for a platform designed for agents from the ground up. He added that it remains unclear who owns agents, who secures them, and who gets paid when they work.
Nebular General Partner Finn Murphy said the economic model for people building agentic tools has never been clear. He said Nebular invested because the team has previously built a developer platform at scale.
Cowboy Cloud and the General Store are available now. The Cowboy Chain testnet is open, with a mainnet launch planned for later this fall. The platform capabilities, security claims, and marketplace figures are self-reported.
