Some businesses grow to be so successful that they could be described as running themselves. Toyo is building a tool to help founders say that about their own businesses from day one.
“The most powerful AI capabilities today are only accessible to technical early adopters. Toyo is closing that gap.”
The startup, which was founded by a team—split between Victoria, BC, and London, UK—wants to provide the productivity gains that tech-savvy early adopters have gained from agentic AI tools like OpenClaw (which performs tasks on behalf of its humans) to non-technical small business founders, Toyo said in a statement.
Toyo’s platform can perform customer relationship management duties, automate emails, and even build websites, all centralized and automated for a founder to simply give the green light. All of this runs in an isolated, sandboxed environment, where agents can access a browser, connect to apps, and text the founder when something needs their attention. The company describes its tool as the “OpenClaw for founders.”
“Think of it like a team of new hires who work around the clock: researching, writing, building, following up,” the company said in a statement. “No technical skills required. A founder briefs them like you’d brief a team member, they get to work.”
The startup was founded by Victoria-based Stuart Bowness, Aidan Hornsby, and London-based CEO Damien Tanner. All three founders are repeat entrepreneurs; Bowness and Tanner co-founded video learning platform MediaCore before it was acquired by Workday in 2015, and Hornsby co-founded the podcast monetization platform Supercast in 2019, but left the company before it was acquired by Fox last month.
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The trio started out building an AI voice infrastructure product, Layercode, before realizing that the AI agents they were using to run their company “were more interesting than the product,” according to Toyo’s statement. Hornsby told BetaKit in an email on Wednesday that, after ten months of work on Layercode, the team fully pivoted to Toyo.
On Tuesday, the startup announced it raised $4.3 million USD ($5.9 million CAD) in seed funding last year on a simple agreement for future equity (SAFE). The round was co-led by Irish venture firm Frontline Ventures and Montréal-based Inovia Capital, with participation from Tiny Supercomputer Investment Company, and angel investors from Amazon, Microsoft, and Cloudflare.
“The most powerful AI capabilities today are only accessible to technical early adopters,” Frontline partner Zoe Chambers said in a statement. “Toyo is closing that gap, giving every founder and operator AI agents that understand their business and work as an extension of their team, in a secure environment they can trust with real operations.”
Hornsby said that Toyo’s engineering team is in London, while its go-to-market team is based in Victoria, and that the company is looking to hire engineers in Canada on the East Coast.
Feature illustration courtesy Alex Riehl for BetaKit. Images courtesy Toyo.