Paperspace Founders Raise $15M for Autonomous, an AI Financial Advisor
Autonomous Technologies Group (ATG) has emerged from stealth with $15 million in pre-seed funding to build an AI-powered financial advisor. Y Combinator CEO Garry Tan led the round, with Pioneer Fund, BoxGroup, Collaborative Fund, Fusion Fund, and the founder of a leading quantitative hedge fund also participating.
The company was founded in 2025 by Dillon Erb and Daniel Kobran, the co-founders of Paperspace, an early GPU cloud provider that DigitalOcean acquired in 2023 for $111 million. Tan partnered with Erb and Kobran during their first stint at YC in 2015.
ATG's first product, called Autonomous, aims to provide financial guidance without the traditional cost structure. The company plans to launch with zero advisory fees for early users and no trading fees.
"We're not saying that we have an AI that's going to pick all the best stocks for you," Erb told Business Insider. Rather, Autonomous helps users implement strategies employed by the ultrawealthy, such as lowering taxes by managing individual stocks instead of standard index funds, and automatically adjusting portfolios to manage risk.
The company aims to build an AI-powered financial institution that automates services typically performed by human advisors. Kobran said ATG is building toward coordinating a user's entire financial picture, including assets such as retirement accounts, cryptocurrency, and startup equity. Over time, it could take on work like angel investments and estate planning. He said he wants the app to make "everything a family office does for a billionaire accessible to everyone."
"The financial advisory industry is one of the last holdouts where human intermediaries extract massive value without creating it. This is the right team at the right inflection point."
— Garry Tan, CEO of Y CombinatorThe Autonomous app will launch this quarter and will be available for free to early users. It uses real-time market data and personal context to provide proactive portfolio monitoring and advice about investments, home purchases, and job offers.
The company has 15 employees across New York and San Francisco and will use the funds to hire more product engineers and AI researchers.