Former OpenAI, Cognition Executives Launch Hone to Deploy AI Agents as Business Operators

Former employees from OpenAI and Cognition have launched Hone, a startup building autonomous AI agents designed to operate aspects of business for weeks or months at a time, raising $60 million in seed funding at a $285 million valuation. The company, led by Moritz Stephan—who previously served as chief of staff at AI coding startup Cognition—represents an emerging thesis that AI systems should move beyond assistance tools to become agents that directly own business outcomes.