We’re (harriethq.com) trying to do this by reframing it as a “provisioning” challenge - how do you get your connectors installed on non-technical desktops, how do you give some easy pre-bake recipes that wake them from their dogmatic slumber
Honestly though we are finding that a little FDE to set up pre-bake stuff that’s sufficiently specific to the customer is needed. Otherwise people are like, “I don’t need to close the books, I need to do a per-working-day profitability analysis for 10 EU countries with different public holidays”, and they get stuck there.
I had the same experience with chatbots, but we shipped a chatbot module a year ago that helps with complex config questions by reading and answering based on a Salesforce Experience site.
I was skeptical but it gets a 68 NPS from users, even if we do get the occasional "why are you investing in AI I hate it" coming through the feedback channel.
As ever, the issue is "what problem are you solving". If it's that you want more people to put their hand up and talk to you/order something, chatbots seem like a bad solution. If it's that you have a ton of complex docs that people have to read in order to implement and use your product, it's not the solution but it's probably part of a solution.
From the comments looks like lots of people looking at this problem from different angles.
We (harriethq.com) also have a somewhat similar insight, which is that setting up connectors is a drag for non-technical users, and a lot of systems don't support per-user connectivity so need an API shim.
The thing I like about this (Agent Vault) approach is that it's more extensible than what we're offering, which is a full managed service. But we've found that some features (e.g. ephemeral sandboxes to execute arbitrary e.g. uvx/npx based mcps) are just a big pain to self-deploy so it's easier for us to provide a service that just works out of the box.
Kudos to the team, this looks great and I'm looking forward to playing with it
Hey! Yeah I think there's overlapping functionality for sure, and you're spot on on people looking at it from different angles.
The "connectors angle" is something we thought about as well and we built a whole product line around that called Agent Sentinel (I'll link that below). We weren't convinced, however, that enterprises were ready for this and instead took it back to our infra roots (Infisical is a security infra platform) and started simple with the problem: credential exfiltration. This thinking does lead to two different kinds of products though with one naturally becoming an infrastructure component; this makes much more sense for us at Infisical to work on.
I think the corrective to this is that many of these incumbents will fail to re-conceive their product stack from a user-centric perspective, and as a result they will be reduce to just a dumb data layer which is easily swappable.
Sure, they could do that, but the cultural change required is an order of magnitude harder than just sticking an agent on top of their source-of-truth and believing that the problem is solved.
Maybe it works for areas where the application is a relatively self-contained island of productivity. Figma is somewhere that a designer spends a lot of their day, so it's going to be less vulnerable, but most pieces of softare fit into broader workflows. So for Figma the disruptor is less likely to be "AI-powered designer" and more "AI-powered web builder" - e.g. Lovable or even Claude Code itself that just generates great designs.
You're completely right, I mistakenly left out the US so I'm going to edit it in. If you include the US, it's five. The first two are of course trivially correct. I'm leaving them unnamed in the hope that those who write all-knowingly about this topic yet can't instantly name them might realize they don't know much about software sovereignty in the first place.
The third one is definitely a notch lower than the others, as I noted. But still IMO noticeably higher than the other 196. The point still stands if you don't count them.
The flip side of this is that if model capabilities are extremely strong such that they are able to saturate the benchmarks, the differentiation and defensibility of a wrapper solution built on top are significantly reduced.
IANAL but e.g. Claude Cowork is already good enough that it's hard to see how the legal tech startups are going to differentiate except around access controls, visual presentation of workflows, etc. And that's in a heavily enterprise/compliance-aware/security-focused context.
Don't get me wrong, that's still a big "except" - big enough for massive companies to be built. Personally the anxiety of being so close to being squashed by the foundation models would make me unhappy as an entrepreneur but looking at the market it seems like many people have a higher risk tolerance.
I keep saying (need to coin a name for this at some point): LLMs, by their general-purpose nature, subsume software products.
Whatever domain-specific capability some software product[0] has, if it's useful to users now, it's more useful if turned into a tool an outside LLM can wield[1]. Users don't care about software products - on the contrary, the product is what stands between the user and what they actually want. If they can afford to delegate using the product to someone else, they do - whether it's to a friend, an external contractor, or an employee hired for that purpose.
This is the value offering LMMs provide to the user: general delegation. If an LLM can operate some software for you, it frees you to focus on problems you need solved. If it can operate multiple software tools, the benefit to you grows superlinearly, as the LLM can use multiple tools to solve problems not addressed individually by any of them. Problems there are no dedicated tools for at all.
This is a big problem for the software industry as it is, because we're relying on the concept of software product as a monetizable unit - some UI layer that defines what can and cannot be done, that we can charge for, and then double-dip with upsells and dark patterns, as UIs are the perfect marketing platforms. General-purpose LLMs sitting on the outside, they break all that by erasing the "product" boundary - and what's worse (for the industry, it's great for me as the user!), as the multi-modal capabilities get better, there's nothing one can do to stop it - even if you purposefully block and obscure any (classically) machine-friendly endpoints, the LLM will just take the hard way, and operate the UI the same way human does.
There's no way I see this won't upend the entire industry in the next couple of years.
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[0] - This includes both products you buy, and products you rent, aka. SaaS.
[1] - As opposed to "inside LLMs", AKA. AI-in-product integrations everyone's doing these days, in a desperate attempt to stay relevant. Outside vs. inside LLM is a difference between your personal assistant and the assistant at some company's reception desk.
Of all the challenges you face as a startup, the legal entity you choose is possibly the least consequential. Just choose a jurisdiction where investors understand how the legals work (Delaware C-corp, UK Ltd is OK too) and there's a finite administrative burden and/or commoditized tooling in place to help you handle it.
Now, that may not work in all jurisdictions for reasons of local taxation etc (and you'll have to work out payroll tax, benefits etc) but that's almost never anything to do with the legal entity type!
> investors understand how the legals work (Delaware C-corp, UK Ltd is OK too)
Man, at least read the title of the submission, even if you're not gonna be bothered reading the contents. This is clearly about EU, incorporating in either of those two places would defeat the entire purpose :)
> the legal entity you choose is possibly the least consequential
I think this is a bit of the goal with EU-INC, so people don't have to think about it as much. Right now, if you're multinational, you really have to be careful what country you use as your base. Hopefully, with something like this, in the future, you can also include a "EU-INC" in there, and advice people to just go with the simplest way. I think that's the dream at least.
And yet I'm not seeing an awful lot of advantage of registering in the EU then if this campaign has to exist - clearly there's a big enough friction to registering / running a company within the EU itself.
> Of all the challenges you face as a startup, the legal entity you choose is possibly the least consequential.
The amount of founders who choose to domicile their company in Estonia because the ticket rates and ease look attractive and who don't understand that this will still need to be administered in their local market as a CFC (controlled foreign corporation) would probably say differently.
> Just choose a jurisdiction where investors understand how the legals work (Delaware C-corp, UK Ltd is OK too) and there's a finite administrative burden and/or commoditized tooling in place to help you handle it.
That's exactly what EU-INC is trying to provide/solve afaict.
This is a EU initiative. Confusingly, EU is often called Europe in spoken/non-official speech. Sort of the same way it is said that Washington does something, when it is the US gov doing something.
You also need portability. As I understand it there's no problem with having a Delaware corp but all your staff and operations being in California, for example. I do not believe this is the case all across the EU! And some localities can have quite onerous formation requirements for no good reason (anything involving notaries, for example - 19th century solution to 19th century problems).
I started a limited company in Spain about 15 years ago. Just the 48h online is huge. It took maybe 15-20 days and visits to the notary, etc. (notaries are usually not available next day, for example). I think Estonia and UK have similar quick ways, but if this is as quick it is definitely an advantage over the status quo. It will affect companies without investors as well, which adds up.
> I believe that the near-term de-dollarization isn't as much trust erosion as it is a tool to provide monetary penalty for behaving in unpredictable ways.
Monetary penalties are different from trust erosion in that they are the test of whether trust can be restored, ie you are acting very unpredictable => I am going to show you I'm paying attention and hit you with a penalty and watch your response. If you continue to show you are unpredictable => I plan an exit so that I don't _have_ to trust you, ie trust erosion.
Ultimately if there's too much unpredictable behavior the pain endured will become higher than the pain of eroding trust... which if trust was truly eroding would be signaled by establishment of monetary systems independent of the US, probably with the International Monetary Fund as a base, backed by at least India, China & Europe.
The difference is emotionally based retaliation vs. reassessing risk. And it's about money, so it's for sure not about emotions. The financial world isn't run on anger and emotions, like the White House.
I have played with this but been underwhelmed. However I do think probably on the right track.
I know the ecosystem not-at-all (sum total knowledge of the CAD ecosystem is that my kids got a Bambu printer for Hanukkah) but it feels to me that current LLMs should be able to generate specs for something like https://partcad.readthedocs.io/en/latest/, which can then be sliced etc.
Curious to know what others think? I come at this from the position of zero interest in developing the fine design skills needed to master but wanting to be able to build and tweak basic functional designs.
Honestly though we are finding that a little FDE to set up pre-bake stuff that’s sufficiently specific to the customer is needed. Otherwise people are like, “I don’t need to close the books, I need to do a per-working-day profitability analysis for 10 EU countries with different public holidays”, and they get stuck there.