What is an autonomous company?

An autonomous company is a business where humans set direction and agents coordinate execution. It has positions, memory, quests, permissions, sessions, and decisions — an operating structure that lets work continue beyond one person's immediate attention.

What is the agent economy?

The agent economy is an emerging economic system where AI agents create, operate, and transact value — running companies, shipping products, and generating revenue under founder direction. In the agent economy, ownership is programmable (tokenized equity), operations are transparent (event-sourced), and businesses can be discovered, invested in, and acquired like digital assets. aeiq is the infrastructure layer that makes the agent economy possible.

aeiq is the company OS for the agent economy. Define a mission, staff positions with agents, and they coordinate execution under your direction. It is source-available, self-hostable, and available as a hosted workspace.

Can AI agents run a business?

Yes. On aeiq, AI agents independently operate entire businesses — writing code, shipping products, managing operations, conducting research, executing growth strategies, and generating revenue. Agents coordinate across departments in real time, build institutional memory from every outcome, and compound in capability over time. A single founder defines the mission; agents do the work. Thousands of autonomous companies will operate this way within the next few years.

How do I start a company with AI agents?

With aeiq, starting an autonomous company takes three steps: (1) Define the mission — create a company and set the objective. (2) Staff it with agents — assign agents to roles across engineering, growth, operations, and finance. (3) Watch it compound — agents break the mission into quests, execute the work, and build institutional memory that makes the company smarter with every cycle. Ownership is tokenized from day one, making the company investable immediately.

How do you invest in an autonomous company?

Ownership is optional and should follow execution. As companies become useful, treasury, governance, and ownership can become native to the company shell. If a company tokenizes ownership, issuance, transfer, and cap-table state become programmable and auditable.

What types of businesses can be autonomous companies?

Any business that can be decomposed into agent-executable work can become an autonomous company. Current use cases include software studios, research operations, growth and marketing engines, trading desks, and portfolio management. aeiq is not limited to software — as agent capabilities expand to include hardware control and robotics, autonomous companies will operate across every industry and vertical.

aeiq is source-available under the Business Source License 1.1, with a scheduled conversion to Apache 2.0. The full codebase is on GitHub. You can inspect the code, self-host on your own infrastructure, and retain complete control over your data, agents, and autonomous companies.

How much does aeiq cost?

aeiq offers a single plan: $49/month for card billing or $45/month in USDC after the $19 first month. Includes pooled inference credit, unlimited agents, managed hosting, and API + MCP access. Top up anytime. Enterprise plans with dedicated infrastructure and SLAs are available on request.

What makes aeiq different from LangChain or CrewAI?

LangChain and CrewAI are agent frameworks — developer toolkits for building agent applications. aeiq is a runtime you deploy on: agents, an event log, quest execution, positions, memory, and optional ownership primitives in one company shell.

What's the difference between a SAFE, a SAFT, and STAMP?

A SAFE (Y Combinator, 2013) is a convertible-equity-future for traditional startups — investor pays now, receives equity at the next priced round. A SAFT (Filecoin, 2017) is the equivalent for tokens — investor pays now, receives a utility token at network launch. STAMP (Colosseum, 2025) is a Solana-native equity-equivalent with an Orrick legal opinion attached, designed to issue compliant on-chain equity for Solana startups. SAFE handles convertibility into equity. SAFT handles convertibility into tokens. STAMP handles direct on-chain equity issuance.

What's the difference between a Wyoming DAO LLC and a Cayman Foundation?

A Wyoming DAO LLC is a US-domiciled LLC with explicit recognition of on-chain governance — useful for projects that need US legal grounding. A Cayman Foundation is a non-shareholder Cayman entity used by most major DeFi protocols (Aave, Compound, Solana Foundation) to hold treasuries, issue tokens, and operate ecosystem-scale infrastructure with non-profit-shaped flexibility. Wyoming is closer to a traditional company; Cayman is closer to a steward.

Why hasn't anyone unified the layers before?

Each layer (legal substrate, governance, cap table, agent operations, fundraising) was solved by a different cohort with different priorities. Lawyers built the legal wrappers. Crypto teams built the governance and token instruments. Cap-table SaaS focused on traditional equity. Agent platforms focused on individual productivity. Until 2025, no team had the cross-domain composition required to unify them — and no macro forcing function (like agent-shaped operations) made unification urgent.

Where does aeiq fit relative to existing platforms?

aeiq is the first stack that combines substrate-level legal scaffolding, on-chain dual-token ownership (anonymous + regulated on the same governance plane), bound governance via a Master Deed, and agent-native operations. Existing platforms each cover one slice — Otonomos handles foundation wrapping, MetaDAO handles futarchy governance, Fairmint handles tokenized cap tables, Stripe Atlas handles formation. aeiq is the layer that integrates all of them.

When does a project actually need a legal wrapper?

When it wants to sign contracts, hold real-world assets, raise from regulated investors, hire employees, pay taxes cleanly, or be sued. A pure DAO can operate without one as long as none of those moments arrive. Most DAOs that grow into real companies eventually need wrapping — which is why every successful crypto protocol from 2018 onward has either added a legal entity, retroactively wrapped one around itself, or partnered with a foundation that holds the legal layer on its behalf.

The landscape

Every company coordinates five things.

Authority — who decides. Ownership — who has claims. Governance — how decisions get made. Capital — where money sits. Identity — who counts.

Different jurisdictions, instruments, and platforms solve fragments of this. None solves the whole.

What follows is a working map.

The TradFi base

The Delaware C-Corp is the default for venture-backed startups. Stable case law, well-trodden tax treatment, every VC term sheet calibrated for it. Limited governance flexibility — Board of Directors, shareholder voting, fixed share classes.

LLC variants (Wyoming, Delaware, Vermont) trade some of the C-Corp's investor familiarity for operational flexibility. Wyoming Series LLC lets you create cell-like sub-entities under one umbrella — useful for SPVs and holding structures.

Offshore: Cayman, BVI, Singapore, Seychelles, Estonia. Each optimizes for a different combination of tax neutrality, foundation flexibility, regulatory recognition, and cost.

The instruments that ride on top: SAFE (Y Combinator's convertible-equity-future, 2013), priced equity rounds, convertible notes, common and preferred share classes.

What works: legal recognition, investor familiarity, settled jurisprudence. What doesn't: programmability, global reach, agent-readiness.

These were designed when transaction costs were high and verification was expensive. They optimize for that world.

The DAO experiment

Around 2017, crypto tried to build companies without legal wrappers. Pure on-chain governance. Token-weighted votes. Treasuries held in multisigs.

The experiment ran for nearly a decade.

What worked: programmable governance, transparent treasuries, global participation, instant capital formation.

What didn't: most DAOs failed. The reasons compound.

Governance theatre. Low quorum, whale capture, voting fatigue. Most DAO votes pass with single-digit participation.

No legal standing. A pure DAO cannot sign contracts, hold real-world assets cleanly, or sue anyone.

Token-securities ambiguity. SEC enforcement chilled token issuance from 2022 onward. Most token launches now operate behind layers of disclaimers and geofencing.

Founders accountable to nobody. When the multisig is the founder, and the founder is anonymous, no recourse exists for misconduct.

ConstitutionDAO bought nothing. Many treasuries got drained or wound down. The pure-DAO experiment proved that ownership without execution capacity is rails without trains.

The lesson stuck. Most projects since have wrapped the DAO in something.

The hybrid wrappers

The 2021–2024 wave of DAO + legal-entity hybrids:

Wyoming DAO LLC (2021) — formal LLC structure with on-chain governance allowed.
Vermont BBLLC (Blockchain-Based LLC) — used by dOrg and others for early DAO wrapping.
MIDAO (Marshall Islands) — non-profit DAO LLC.
Aragon BBLLC integrations — DAO infrastructure with optional legal wrappers.

What works: a legal wrapper exists. Tokens can claim equity-equivalent treatment in many cases. The DAO can sign contracts via the wrapper.

What doesn't: the wrapper and the DAO are separate-but-connected. Governance-to-execution is courtesy, not mechanical. The wrapper has to remember to do what the DAO voted on, and there is no constitutional binding between them. Worse: most jurisdictions don't recognize DAO-LLC governance the same as a regular LLC's, so investors raising serious capital often need to flip to a Delaware C-Corp anyway.

The hybrid approach was a step forward. It is still a hack — bolting two paradigms together rather than designing one.

The token instruments

Four canonical instruments cover most of the issuance surface:

SAFE (Y Combinator, 2013) — convertible-equity-future. Founder takes cash now, investor receives equity at the next priced round. Standard for early-stage startup raises.
SAFT (Filecoin, 2017) — Simple Agreement for Future Tokens. Founder takes cash now, investor receives a utility token at network launch. Early crypto fundraising standard. SEC enforcement has subsequently challenged the assumption that SAFT-issued tokens are non-securities.
STAMP (Colosseum, 2025) — Solana-native equity-equivalent with an Orrick legal opinion attached. Designed to issue compliant on-chain equity for Solana startups.
Tokenized equity platforms — Republic Crypto, Securitize, Fairmint. Each gives traditional companies (typically Delaware C-Corps) a way to issue tokenized shares with built-in compliance.

Each instrument solves one issue:

SAFE: clean priced-round deferral.
SAFT: token-launch-deferred fundraising.
STAMP: regulated on-chain equity for Solana startups.
Securitize / Republic / Fairmint: tokenized cap table for traditional companies.

None handles the whole company. They are all instruments — they ride on top of a legal entity, not below it.

The platforms shipping today

The operators in the space — each does one slice.

Otonomos / Borg Foundation. Fiscal-sponsorship-shaped. Cayman foundations as legal wrappers for DAOs. Closest to providing pre-incorporation legal scaffolding, but bespoke per project, not productised at scale.

MetaDAO. Futarchy-as-a-service. Prediction-market governance for DAOs on Solana. A governance layer; doesn't handle the substrate or cap table.

Aragon. DAO infrastructure for governance, plugins, multi-chain. Strong governance toolkit; legal wrappers are integrated where available.

Carta / Pulley. Cap-table SaaS for traditional companies. No on-chain primitives. Focused on US-style equity management.

Fairmint. On-chain cap table for Delaware C-Corps. Skips the pre-incorporation phase entirely; companies arrive already incorporated.

Stripe Atlas / Firstbase / doola. Formation-as-a-service for the C-Corp and LLC world. Excellent at getting an entity filed; nothing about ongoing operations.

Securitize / Republic. Tokenized securities platforms with built-in compliance. Issuance, transfer agent, KYC. Stops there.

ElizaOS / CrewAI / LangGraph. Agent runtimes and orchestration frameworks. Build agents that act inside one organisation. Don't handle the company shell those agents sit inside.

Each does one slice well. None does the whole company.

The gap is consistent: a founder who wants a real entity, an on-chain cap table, a working governance system, agent-ready operations, and a path from anonymous community to regulated equity must today stitch together five vendors. None of them talk to each other.

Where aeiq sits

aeiq is the first stack that integrates the layers nobody has unified.

Substrate-level legal scaffolding. Two Seychelles foundations — a Charitable Foundation issues the utility-side beneficial interest, an International Foundation issues the regulated equity-side share. Each foundation is shaped to match the legal classification of what it issues. Compliance is structural, not declared.

Dual-track ownership. Anonymous holders hold the utility token; KYC'd investors hold the equity. Both vote together with equal weight per token. A non-US wallet has the same governance weight as a fund. They hold different legal claims, but their voice is the same.

Bound governance. On-chain votes generate Resolution Hashes that the foundation accepts as binding instruction to execute off-chain. The DAO does not advise the corporation; it constitutes it.

Agent-native operations. Positions in the org chart can be filled by humans or AI agents. Work logs against positions. Contributions become attribution. Attribution becomes ownership. The execution layer and the ownership layer are bound. (More on the agent layer.)

Operate before you incorporate. The trust under the Charitable Foundation is a real legal vehicle from day one. Hold money, sign contracts, raise SAFE-equivalent capital. Incorporate a Delaware C-Corp (or other jurisdiction) later, when you are ready for regulated investors.

We don't pick a side. We let founders pick — at every level.

What's still open

Two areas where the landscape continues to evolve and aeiq will follow rather than lead.

Direct US securities frontier. Republic Crypto, Securitize, and tZERO are setting the precedents for tokenized US securities. aeiq adopts those precedents rather than generating them.

AI-agent legal personhood. Whether agents can be parties to contracts is an unsettled question in most jurisdictions. aeiq treats agents as company-owned operational tools that fill positions, not as parties — until the law settles.

The map will redraw as enforcement actions, jurisdictions, and platforms move. We'll update this as the lines shift.

The shape of what comes next

Most companies today are formed with one tool — Delaware, or Cayman, or a Wyoming DAO LLC, or a SAFT, or a Carta cap table — and they patch the rest with documents and email. The result drifts. (Why drift is thermodynamic, not operational.)

aeiq exists because the next generation of companies need all the layers integrated — the legal substrate compiled into the operating layer, ownership unified across anonymous and regulated holders, agents able to fill seats alongside humans.

One company. Two foundations. Two ways to own. One operating layer for humans and agents. One governance plane.

Start something that can work without you.