Jonas Templestein, co-founder of digital banking giant Monzo, is charting a bold new course in the entrepreneurial world by envisioning businesses that operate entirely without human intervention. Templestein’s new venture, Nustom, initially aimed to build generative AI coding tools for SaaS products but has recently pivoted to focus on creating startups that are conceived, managed, and scaled by AI agents. At the core of this shift is his ambition to establish autonomous enterprises that fundamentally change how businesses are developed and operated.
Nustom’s first product, Garple, exemplifies this vision by providing an automated service for generating domain names for new companies. Templestein calls this a “Level 2 startup,” where AI agents are already capable of executing well-defined processes like customer service or software development based on plain-English instructions. He sees this as a stepping stone to more sophisticated companies fully run by AI, where agents ideate business concepts, raise capital—possibly through crypto tokens—and execute operations without human input. While this vision may sound futuristic, Templestein insists that legal and financial system reforms are essential for these AI-led businesses to become a reality.
His ambitious vision has garnered support from notable figures in the tech and finance worlds, including Monzo’s former CEO Tom Blomfield. Meanwhile, the industry at large is starting to reflect this paradigm shift. Klarna, the buy-now-pay-later giant, has embraced a more AI-intensive approach by reducing its workforce significantly and exploring the potential of replacing many human roles with AI systems. Klarna CEO Sebastian Siemiatkowski echoed this sentiment, acknowledging in a candid post on X that even his position could soon be rendered unnecessary by AI advancements. While he admits to finding this reality “gloomy,” he emphasized the importance of adapting to these changes rather than ignoring their inevitability.
Templestein’s and Siemiatkowski’s views point to a disruptive shift in the corporate landscape, where AI is not just an enabler but the very core of operations. With the debut of tools like Garple and the increasing willingness of firms like Klarna to embrace AI, the stage is being set for a new era of entrepreneurship. Autonomous startups run entirely by AI agents may not just remain a speculative concept for long—they could soon become a defining feature of the modern economy.