Text an idea. Get a business.
That's what the Silicon Valley startup incubator Y Combinator's AI agent, Locus Founder, launched Monday. All a user has to do is send a business idea via iMessage, SMS, or Telegram, and the AI takes care of the rest, including researching the market using 40-plus paid data APIs and generating a brand identity.
"The AI agent that earns you a dollar by running your business, just by texting it," the official blog post said.
It also builds full-stack websites, sources products and runs outbound email and social media campaigns that involve generating short-form video ads and posting them on Meta, the blog post added.
More importantly, it also handles the money.
Locus Founder accepts payments in USDC, the world's second-largest dollar-pegged cryptocurrency, as well as card payments. This payment mechanism runs on Pay With Locus, a non-custodial wallet infrastructure built for AI agents to spend money safely, with built-in spending controls and auditability.
Locus Founder settles payments in USDC, a dollar-pegged stablecoin, directly into a non-custodial wallet controlled by the agent, without a bank account or days of settlement. The agent earns, holds, and spends money in real time — and the infrastructure is built so humans can audit and control exactly what it does with that money. When a sale is made, Checkout With Locus, a Stripe-style payment SDK, settles the funds directly into the agent's Locus wallet.
"Every Locus Founder user is a Pay With Locus user (credits run off our wallets), a Build With Locus deployment (sites deploy on BWL), and a consumer of our pay-per-use API suite. It's the first app anyone can pick up and use, sitting on top of all of our infrastructure," the post added.
In other words, Locus isn't just an AI that texts users business updates. It is a vertically integrated system in which an AI agent can research, build, market, sell, and get paid entirely autonomously, with USDC as the financial layer connecting it all.
The launch shows where AI agents are heading.
Agentic systems are no longer just about bots that help users write emails or make payments. They are evolving into autonomous economic actors that can float new businesses, advertise, generate revenue and settle it in crypto.
In May, combined exchange volumes fell 3.45% to $4.41T; the lowest since September 2024. RWA perpetual futures volumes rose 10.4% against the trend, hitting a new all-time high.
Disclosure & Polices : CoinDesk is an award-winning media outlet that covers the cryptocurrency industry. Its journalists abide by a strict set of editorial policies . CoinDesk has adopted a set of principles aimed at ensuring the integrity, editorial independence and freedom from bias of its publications. CoinDesk is part of Bullish (NYSE:BLSH), an institutionally focused global digital asset platform that provides market infrastructure and information services. Bullish owns and invests in digital asset businesses and digital assets and CoinDesk employees, including journalists, may receive Bullish equity-based compensation.
新闻图片
