Key Points
- PoobahAI launches “Virtual Cofounder”, an AI-powered engineering system that designs, builds and deploys investor-grade software from web-based prompts.
- Target users are non-technical or under-resourced founders, who can now build functional MVPs, prototypes and verifiable on-chain deployments without hiring an engineering team.
- PoobahAI claims it can compress idea-to-traction timelines from 12–18 months to 3–6 months.
PoobahAI, an AI-powered no-code platform for Web3 development, is rolling out a product it says can stand in for a technical cofounder at the earliest stages of a startup.
The new system, called Virtual Cofounder, is an intelligent engineering stack that designs, builds and deploys what the company describes as “investor-grade” software from a browser prompt, with a particular emphasis on blockchain-native applications. The product enters private beta this month with a small group of founders selected from PoobahAI’s roughly 4,000-person waitlist, ahead of a broader public launch planned for the first quarter of 2026, the company said in a press relese shared with AlexaBlockchain.
Virtual Cofounder sits on top of PoobahAI’s Model Context Protocol (MCP) Server, a multi-chain system that gives AI agents direct, stateful access to blockchain networks. Rather than stopping at code suggestions, the MCP layer is designed to let agents deploy smart contracts, launch tokens, operate DeFi positions and coordinate multi-chain workflows autonomously, according to the company’s technical documentation.
From a founder’s perspective, the interface is deliberately simple. Users describe the product they want in natural language inside a web app; PoobahAI’s system then generates the architecture, writes and iterates the production code, provisions and deploys infrastructure, and produces documentation within the same workflow. Crucially for Web3 projects, it can also execute live on-chain transactions and maintain two-way interaction with supported networks, enabling what PoobahAI pitches as “real MVPs” rather than static demos.
The company is targeting a familiar bottleneck in early-stage fundraising: investors’ reluctance to back teams that have an idea but no proven technical execution. Venture capital firms often favor founding teams with pedigrees from brand-name technology and crypto companies such as Coinbase or OpenAI. PoobahAI’s pitch is that a non-technical founder can now show up to a seed meeting with a working decentralized application and clean codebase, even without a human engineering partner.
“Stop pitching what you’ll build with the right hire, … Start showing what you’ve already built, with institutional-grade engineering,” PoobahAI President and Chairman Dana Love said, framing the system as a way to “demonstrate execution, credibility and momentum in real time.”
In its own tests, the company says Virtual Cofounder can compress the path from concept to investable traction from 12 to 18 months down to roughly three to six months, in part by removing friction around hiring, equity negotiations and retention of key engineers. The system is designed to output what PoobahAI calls “investor-grade” assets from day one: a structured, scalable codebase, deployment scripts and documentation aimed at withstanding diligence by technical reviewers.
One early user cited by the company is a founder who had delayed building an NFT ticketing application because the smart-contract and infrastructure work felt too complex. With Virtual Cofounder, PoobahAI says the founder described the product once; the agent generated the architecture, produced APIs, deployed the contracts and spun up a working frontend in a single workflow, turning a persistent whiteboard idea into a live product over the course of a summer.
The launch builds on PoobahAI’s October debut of its multi-chain MCP Server, which the company describes as one of the first MCP implementations focused on bringing AI agents directly on-chain. The server, built on Anthropic’s Model Context Protocol standard, is positioned as the first of its kind in the Cosmos ecosystem and exposes agents to a library of more than 30 audited “Digital Objects” — modular smart-contract components for tasks such as token issuance, NFT auctions and cross-chain DeFi operations.
PoobahAI is a new entrant to the AI-and-Web3 tooling race. Founded in July 2025 and based in Fort Worth, Texas, the startup offers a no-code platform that lets users assemble blockchains, tokens and decentralized applications via a drag-and-drop builder and multi-chain command-line interface. The company says its tools can reduce development time by about 60% and cut costs by as much as 90% compared with traditional bespoke development.
In October, PoobahAI disclosed a $2 million seed round, led by FourTwoAlpha Ltd., to accelerate its roadmap in AI-Web3 integration and expand go-to-market efforts. That funding came amid a broader wave of investor interest in “agentic” AI systems capable of autonomously carrying out complex tasks, including software development, rather than merely assisting humans.
The wider market for AI-assisted development has grown increasingly crowded. Tools such as Cognition Labs’ Devin, branded as an “AI software engineer,” and Replit’s Agent, which generates applications from natural-language descriptions, illustrate how quickly AI has moved from code autocomplete to multi-step project execution in conventional software workflows. In Web3 specifically, open-source frameworks like Eliza and infrastructure providers such as thirdweb are building stacks that let AI agents read and write blockchain data, interact with smart contracts and automate transactions across networks.
PoobahAI is betting that there is room for a vertically integrated, AI-first platform focused on founders rather than developers. While thirdweb and similar toolkits target engineers who want better SDKs, RPC services and contract catalogs, PoobahAI aims to abstract away most of that complexity and package the entire workflow behind conversational prompts and pre-audited components.
“With Virtual Cofounder, founders move past the talent bottleneck,” CTO Leif Sørensen said. He argued that the system lets small teams “execute with the same technical sophistication as a funded engineering team, and prove it to investors on day one.”
The product also arrives as researchers and infrastructure providers explore how autonomous agents will interact with financial systems. Academic work and industry reports over the past year have highlighted questions around secure agent-initiated payments, on-chain identity for AI agents and the emergence of “DeFAI” — DeFi protocols operated or augmented by autonomous software agents. By giving commercial agents the ability to push live transactions and manage on-chain positions, platforms like PoobahAI’s MCP Server may accelerate those trends while raising new questions about governance, safety and control.
For now, PoobahAI’s Virtual Cofounder will be tested in a controlled beta with a select group of founders, who will provide feedback on reliability, code quality and the end-to-end user experience.
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