WTF AGENTS
Guide 19 / 23

WTF is NanoCorp

The only platform that publishes what its companies earn.

The Polsia rival that publishes what its AI-run companies actually earn — and the number is small. One prompt, a live business in minutes, full autonomy by design, and the most honest scoreboard in the category. What it is, what it costs, who it fits.

The one-liner

NanoCorp is a platform where you type one sentence, answer a short founding interview, and an AI agent builds a real business — landing page, app, database, payments, custom domain — then prospects, emails customers, runs ads and sends you a daily report. You steer by chatting with it.

It is the same pitch as Polsia with two differences that matter. NanoCorp is built by AI researchers around a single measurable goal, revenue, with no approval gates. And it publishes, live, what every company on the platform has actually earned.

By the numbers — September 2026

60 daysto $1M in annual recurring revenue for the platform itself, with no paid acquisition, per the founder
$2,570the most any single NanoCorp-built company has earned, across 748 sales, on the public leaderboard
2companies on the platform that have passed $1,000 in revenue
$264cumulative revenue across every company on the platform in May 2026, from 29 transactions — the founder's own public figure at the time
$0 → $30free to start with welcome credits; Founder tier $30/mo for 30 credits, scaling to 2,000 credits/mo
20%withdrawal fee on revenue your company earns
96%of businesses ship a live site, per the company

Who built it

NanoCorp is a product of Phospho, a French startup from Y Combinator's Winter 2024 batch. The founder, Pierre-Louis Biojout, trained at École Polytechnique and worked on AI for robotics before turning to agents that run whole companies. The team describes itself as AI, machine-learning and mathematics researchers, and the product shows it: the founding idea is that a company is a reinforcement-learning environment, and the agent's job is to climb one reward signal — revenue — inside a hard budget.

Unlike Polsia's one-person operation, NanoCorp publishes a contact address on every page, runs a public Discord, and the engineers who wrote it answer customer email.

How it works

One sentence, then an interview

You describe an idea, or click "surprise me." A short founding interview shapes it — who it is for, what it charges, what it does — and you press Start.

The agent builds the company

From the founding turn, the agent turns the brief into software: a landing page, a working app, a database, Stripe products with pricing tiers, a custom domain, an email address. Reviewers report a live business inside twenty minutes with zero code written.

Then it runs it

The agent prospects and emails potential customers, writes and runs Meta ads on Facebook and Instagram against a daily budget, handles the inbox, and sends a daily report. It works on a schedule; you chat with it to redirect, adjust pricing, kill a task.

No approval gates, by design

Every action the agent decides on, it takes. NanoCorp's argument: approval gates "kill the gradient" — a company that has to wait for a human on every step cannot learn what works. That is the opposite philosophy to Cofounder.co, which gates anything risky behind a human, and a sharper version of Polsia.

Your conglomerate

The dashboard lets you run several companies in parallel and compare them. Credits are the unit of work; the plan sets how many per month.

The scoreboard — what the live numbers say

NanoCorp does something no competitor does: it shows you, on a public page, what its companies earn. This is its best feature and its most awkward one.

In May 2026 the founder reported the cumulative revenue of every company ever built on the platform: $264.27, from 29 transactions. By September the top company on the leaderboard had earned $2,570 across 748 sales and a second had passed $1,000. The platform itself, meanwhile, reached a million dollars in annual recurring revenue in under two months — from subscriptions, not from what the companies sell.

Read those two facts together. The people paying NanoCorp are earning it far more than their companies are earning them. That is not a NanoCorp problem; it is the shape of the whole autonomous-company category, and Polsia's founder has said the same thing about his platform out loud. NanoCorp is simply the one that shows you the number instead of making you ask.

NanoCorp vs Polsia vs Cofounder.co

NanoCorpPolsiaCofounder.co
Built byAI researchers, YCOne founderA New York studio
AutonomyFull, no gatesFullHuman approval on risky actions
PricingPublic: free, $30/mo upIn-app: $20–1,000/moPublic
Fees on revenue20% withdrawal fee3% + 20% on ad spend, $500/mo cap
Publishes company revenueYes, liveNoNo
Agents you can plug inClaude Code, Codex, more comingFixedOwn departments
ScaleSmallNearly half a million companiesSmall

Polsia is the biggest. Cofounder.co is the most cautious. NanoCorp is the most transparent and the most opinionated: it would rather its agent make a wrong decision and learn than wait for you.

The catches

  • The 20% withdrawal fee is steep against Polsia's 3%, and it applies to every dollar your company makes. On a $1,000 business that is $200.
  • Full autonomy means full autonomy. The agent emails real prospects and spends real ad money without asking. Set the budget cap before you set anything else.
  • The free tier is a demo. Three lifetime credits and one company. You will be at $30 within a day of trying it seriously.
  • Small platform, big promise. Two companies past $1,000 is the entire success story so far. Some showcased features were still marked coming soon at time of writing.
  • The same trap as every platform here. "Surprise me" builds a company nobody asked for. NanoCorp cannot validate an idea; it can only execute one. See the Polsia guide for how that ends.

Who it is for

Yes — Builders who want to test a validated idea fast, see honestly whether it sells, and are comfortable with an agent acting without asking. Anyone who wants to run several cheap experiments in parallel and kill the losers.

Not yet — Anyone who needs approval steps, or whose idea needs a human sale. Cofounder.co for the first; a real founder for the second.

No — Anyone expecting the platform to find the customers. The scoreboard is the answer to that.

Why it matters

NanoCorp's live revenue page is the most useful single artefact in the autonomous-company category, because it converts a marketing claim — "AI that runs your company while you sleep" — into a number you can check. The number is small and growing. That is the truth of the category in September 2026, and NanoCorp is the only platform willing to say it on its own homepage.

Glossary

NanoCorp
Platform where an AI agent builds and runs a company from one prompt. A product of Phospho (Y Combinator W24). nanocorp.so.
Credits
NanoCorp's unit of agent work. Free tier has a few; Founder tier gives 30 a month.
Conglomerate
Your NanoCorp dashboard: several autonomous companies run and compared in parallel.
The floor
NanoCorp's public live page showing what its companies earn.
Reward signal
In reinforcement learning, the single number an agent tries to increase. For a NanoCorp company: revenue.
Approval gate
A step where a human must sign off before an agent acts. NanoCorp has none by design; Cofounder.co is built on them.
Withdrawal fee
NanoCorp's 20% cut when you take out revenue your company earned.
Phospho
The French YC startup behind NanoCorp, co-founded by Pierre-Louis Biojout.

NanoCorp is one of three ways to have agents run a company. Here are the others, and how to manage the agents yourself.

Get the rest of the series

Every WTF Agents guide is written the same way — plain English, no hype, no jargon. $7 each, or take a bundle.

Go deeper