San Francisco-based startup Okibi is a web app that lets anyone create AI agents and workflow automations just by describing tasks in plain English. This web app “provides a chat interface and toolkit to easily create AI agents.”
Described as “an agent that builds agents,” Okibi is designed to remove the friction of building automations, something the founders struggled with firsthand. After more than a decade of building software and seven years of working together, Y Combinator alumni Mahyad Ghassemibouyaghchi and Saurav Mitra saw how even tech-savvy teams were tired by repetitive tasks, patchy integrations, and maintenance-heavy solutions like Zapier chains and custom scripts.
With Okibi, “just describe your needs in plain language — like explaining tasks to a colleague — and Okibi handles the complexity for you from tool integrations and browser automation to human-in-the-loop processes and initial agent evaluations,” as per the LinkedIn post.
The platform is already being used by 15 Y Combinator startups to handle everything from sales lead qualification and invoice generation to client call prep and pricing proposals. Okibi aims to make agents as easy to build as typing an instruction.
This is their founder’s second startup in building. Their motivation to build Okibi comes from hard-earned lessons. As shared by the founders of Okibi, at their previous venture SigmaOS, they built the first browser with built-in agents and quickly found themselves drowning in repetitive tasks. Creating and maintaining those internal agents was anything but smooth. They often had to cobble together fragile workflows using Zapier, Lindy, custom scripts, or hacked-together LLM tools and even then, things broke or became unmanageable over time. That load planted the seed for Okibi.
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There are a bunch of tools out there trying to make it easier to build agents, but none really take the same approach as Okibi. Zapier and Make (which used to be called Integromat) have been the go-to tools for automating tasks by linking different apps together. They’re super handy for building workflows, but everything is done by manually using visual flows and logic blocks. It’s more like building a flowchart than just telling the system what users want in plain English.
Newer tools like Lindy have made it easier to get started by letting users describe tasks in everyday language which is definitely a move in the right direction. But when it comes to handling more layered workflows, like automating browser interactions, adding in human approvals, or dealing with complex conditions, they still tend to hit limits. Cognosys goes deeper with more powerful agents that can browse the web, call APIs, and handle live integrations but it leans heavily on a visual builder and still doesn’t let its users just describe what they want in everyday language.
That’s where Okibi stands out. According to the founders, users can just explain their workflow in plain English, and it figures out everything from browser steps to tool calls, conditional logic, human input, and even runs a test to make sure their agent works right.