Hone

Hone's launch introduces Engines, autonomous AI systems designed to take ownership of a specific business metric rather than answer questions or complete isolated tasks. A customer points an Engine at a goal tied to a role like procurement coordinator or outbound sales rep, and the system studies internal tools, historical decisions, and workflows before writing its own skills and acting on real events. Hone is pitching this at enterprise teams that want accountability measured in dollars of value created, with the Engine tested against prior decisions before going live and improving from corrections made by anyone on the team. The company is led by CEO Moritz Stephan, formerly chief of staff at Cognition, where he worked on long-horizon agent infrastructure, alongside co-founders Oliver Brady (early engineer at Harvey and later Mercor's enterprise team) and Carlo Kobe (a Thiel Fellow who previously co-founded Fizz with Stephan). The launch coincides with a $60 million seed round led by Benchmark and Index Ventures, with early customers including Cognition itself and AI inference company Modal. For founders and operators tracking the agent landscape, this launch matters because it stakes out a position beyond the current chatbot and task-agent wave, targeting outcomes like customer retention, lead conversion, vendor management, and credit risk where enterprises have been reluctant to delegate real responsibility. Whether Engines can deliver on that framing in production is still open, but the team, backing, and design choices make Hone one of the more concrete attempts to put long-running autonomous work inside large organizations.