This AI-powered startup studio plans to launch 100,000 companies a year — really

Henrik Werdelin has spent the past 15 years to help entrepreneurs build major brands like Barkbox via his start -up studio Prehyper. Now with its new company based in New York TissueHe bet that AI can help him evolve this process of “tens” of startups per year to “hundreds of thousands” of budding business owners.

The timing certainly seems good. Mass layoffs in a variety of industries have left many workers to reconsider their career path, while AI tools have considerably reduced the barrier to the construction of digital products and services. At the center of this Venn diagram is the latest Werdelin company, with its promise to help “everyday entrepreneurs to create $ a million IA companies” without requiring technical skills.

The Werdelin de Prehype course in Audos reflects the broader transformation in entrepreneurship at the moment. At Prehype, the emphasis was put on work with the founders of technology to build traditional startups, the genre that could increase millions and target dead from $ 1 billion.

Now he says to Techcrunch: “What we are trying to do is take all this knowledge, all the methodology that we have created over the years of creation of all these large companies and really try to democratize it.”

The idea is that “everyday entrepreneurs” may feel that a change is underway but may not be eager to experiment with so -called AI agents or to know how to reach customers. Audos is more than happy to help them, providing these people with AI tools to build sophisticated products using natural language and take advantage of social media algorithms to find their niche customers.

“Facebook and many of these platforms are just incredible algorithms, and they are incredible to understand [how to reach your customer] If you define a group of customers, ”explains Werdelin, who co -founded Audos with his partner of Prehype Nicholas Thorne. In fact, Audos uses this system to quickly test if the business idea of ​​a founder has sustainable customer acquisition costs.

The approach seems to work. Audos has helped launch “hundreds of hundreds” of companies since its beta launch, its own customers discovering the platform via Instagram advertisements asking “Have you ever thought about starting something, but I don’t know where to go?” Among them, says Werdelin, a car mechanic who wants to help people assess repair quotes, a person who sells services “after the logistics of death”, virtual golf swing coaches and AI nutritionists. In a flashing reference to $ 1 billion companies, or what are called unicorns, he calls these teams of one and two “DonkeyCorns”.

Everyone has passed the same process: they clicked on the announcement of Audos, his AI agent launched a conversation to understand the problems that these people want to tackle and what they want to serve and, when he was satisfied with the answers, Audos put them in front of potential customers as quickly as possible.

As for yields, Audos operates on a fundamentally different model from traditional accelerators or venture capital. Instead of taking equity, the company takes a share of revenue of 15% of the companies it helps to launch. In return, the founders receive up to $ 25,000 in funding, access to these commercial development tools fueled in AI and help distribution, mainly through remunerated advertising on social networks.

“We do not take any clear value in their business,” says Werdelin, in part because “we do not think that these companies could never be sold. What we are really inspired by Mom-And-Pop stores which are the backbone of our society. ”

The share of income continues indefinitely, similar to the platform fees billed by the Apple App Store. For the founders, this means abandoning a large part of their perpetuity income – a decrease of 15% which could cost entrepreneurs of hundreds of thousands of dollars over time. Some will undoubtedly see this compromise as valid; Others might wonder if the long -term costs justify the advantages.

The proposal for the value of Audos raises other questions given the speed with which the landscape changes. While Werdelin emphasizes the founders to establish relations with customers, it is not clear to what extent this work can really manage that AI agents can really manage. There is also the question of differentiation. As Werdelin easily recognizes, “the world is full of these tools” and they improve quickly. What happens when entrepreneurs can access similar IA capacities without paying a permanent income tax?

Audos VCs do not seem worried about these scenarios. True Ventures led the dollars’ $ 11.5 million seed tower, with his partner Tony Conrad explaining the call in a zoom call this week. In addition to having confidence in Werdelin and Thorne, Conrad said: “I think there are just a lot of people” who could impatiently adopt the opportunity to work with a platform like Audos.

Conrad establishes parallels at the exit of a billion dollars of Instagram with only 13 employees, suggesting that AI could allow even more leverage effect, even if Audos – which itself employs only five currently – do not run unicorns. As Werdelin explains, “what we are looking for here are the millions of people who can create companies of $ 1 million or half-million dollars who are real and who change their life.”

Adds Werdelin separately why he turned Audos: “What we are trying to do is understanding how you have a million companies that have a turnover of a million dollars. It is a turnover company. “

It doesn’t seem crazy. Expanding the advantages of entrepreneurship to people who, traditionally, have not had access to start -up capital or technical skills is an increasingly convincing proposal when traditional employment begins to feel less and less stable. “We believe that there should be someone who comes out and really helps these little entrepreneurs who build something that does not venture,” says Werdelin. “We think the world is better with more entrepreneurship.”

Other Audos investors include Offline Venture and Bungalow Capital, as well as many high -level providential investors – Niklas Zennstrom and Mario Schlosser among them.

In the photo above, from left to right, the co-founders of Audos Nicholas Thorne and Henrik Werdelin.