Henrik Werdelin has helped entrepreneurs to construct large brands like Barkbox through his startup studio for the past 15 years In advance. Now based with its latest company in New York tissueHe relies on the indisputable fact that AI can assist him scale this technique of “ten” from startups per yr to “a whole bunch of hundreds” of the emerging business owners.
The timing definitely feels right. Mass decisions in a wide range of industries have caused many employees to rethink their profession paths, while KI tools have significantly reduced the barrier to constructing digital services. At the middle of this Venn diagram is Werdelin's latest company with the promise that “on a regular basis entrepreneurs hundreds of thousands of dollars -KI -KI company” is to require technical skills.
Werdelin's journey from the preparation -to Audos reflects the broader transformation in current entrepreneurship. At Prehypy, the main target was on working with technical founders to construct traditional startups which will increase hundreds of thousands and goal billion dollars.
Now he says Techcrunch: “We try to take all of the knowledge, all of the methodology that we have now created through the years when constructing all these large firms and really attempt to democratize it.”
The idea is that “on a regular basis entrepreneurs” can feel that a shift is underway, but may not wish to experiment with so-called AI agents or know how you can achieve customers. Audos helps you greater than completely satisfied to provide help to provide them with KI tools, to construct sophisticated products with the assistance of natural language and use social media algorithms to search out them as area of interest customers.
“Facebook and plenty of of those platforms, they’re simply incredible algorithms, and it’s unbelievable to search out out (as you’ll be able to reach your customers) whenever you define a customer group,” says Werdos, who co-founded Audos along with his Prehype partner Nicholas Thorne. In fact, Audos uses this technique to quickly test whether the business idea of ​​a founder has sustainable customer acquisition costs.
The approach seems to work. Audos has launched “low a whole bunch” of firms since his beta start. Your own customers discovered the platform on Instagram: “Have you ever thought of starting something but not knowing where to go?” Among them, says Werdelin, are an auto mechanic who desires to help people evaluate repair quotes, a one that sells “after death logistics” services, virtual golf -swing trainers and AI dietary scientists. In a winking reference to billion dollar firms or so-called unicorns, he calls these teams and two people “Donkeycorns”.
Everyone went through the identical process: they clicked on Audos' commercial, his AI agent began a conversation to find out the issues that these people need to tackle and who they would love to serve and when it was satisfied with the answers, Audos presented them to potential customers as soon as possible.
With regard to the returns, Audos works on a fundamental model than conventional accelerators or risk capital. Instead of taking equity, the corporate takes over a sales share of 15% of the businesses it starts. In return, the founders receive as much as $ 25,000 in funds, access to those AI-driven business development tools and help with the distribution (primarily through paid social media promoting).
“We don't take equity in your corporation,” says Werdelin. There just isn’t much point. “We don't consider that these firms are ever sold,” he says. “What we actually inspired are the mom and pop stores which might be the backbone of our society.”
The share of sales continues for an indefinite period, much like the platform fees which might be calculated within the app store from Apple. For founders, which means that a big a part of their turnover gives as much as everlasting income – a discount of 15%that entrepreneurs could cost a whole bunch of hundreds of dollars over time. Some will undoubtedly consider this compromise as worthwhile. Others could ask themselves whether the long -term costs justify the benefits.
Audos' promise to value also raises other questions, because the landscape changes quickly. While Werdelin emphasizes that founders help to construct relationships with customers, it’s unclear how much of this work the AI ​​agents can actually do. There can be the query of differentiation. As Werdelin willingly recognizes: “The world is filled with these tools” and so they quickly recover. What happens if entrepreneurs can access similar AI skills without paying a everlasting insertion control?
Audos' VCS don’t sound concerned about these scenarios. True Ventures headed Audoss 11.5 million dollars -Sowing round, whereby the partner Tony Conrad explained the attractiveness in a zoom call this week. Conrad just isn’t only trust in Werdelin and Thorne, but additionally: “I feel there are only many, many individuals” who’ve the chance to work with a platform like Audos.
Conrad draws parallels to Instagram's exit of 1 billion US dollars with only 13 employees, which indicates that AI could enable much more leverage, even when Audos, which currently only employs five employees, doesn’t hunt the unicorns. As Werdelin explains: “What we thought listed here are the hundreds of thousands of individuals, the million dollar firms or half one million dollar business that could be created real and life.”
Adds Werdelin individually why he excited Audos: “We try to search out out how you can earn one million firms that earn a million dollars (within the annual turnover). This is a trillion dollar sales business.”
It doesn't sound crazy in mid to 2025. The expansion of some great benefits of entrepreneurship to individuals who traditionally didn’t have access to startup capital or technical skills is an increasingly convincing statement, since traditional employment feels less and fewer stable.
“We consider that there ought to be someone who runs out and to the smaller entrepreneurs who construct something that doesn't bake back,” says Werdelin. “We consider that the world is healthier with more entrepreneurship.”
Other Audos investors include Offline Venture and Bungalow Capital in addition to quite a few top-class angel investor niklas Zennstrom and Mario Schlosser.
