Henrik Werdelin has spent the last 15 years helping entrepreneurs build big brands like Barkbox through his startup studio Prehype. Now, with his new, New York-based venture Audos, he’s betting that AI can help him scale that process from “tens” of startups a year to “hundreds of thousands” of aspiring business owners.
The timing certainly feels right. Mass layoffs across a variety of industries have left many workers reconsidering their career paths, while AI tools have markedly lowered the barrier to building digital products and services. At the center of that Venn diagram is Werdelin’s latest venture, with its promise to help “everyday entrepreneurs create million dollar AI companies” without requiring technical skills or giving up equity.
Werdelin’s journey from Prehype to Audos reflects the broader transformation happening in entrepreneurship right now. At Prehype, which he started around 2010, the focus was on working with tech founders to build traditional startups, the kind that might raise millions and aim for billion-dollar exits.
Now, he tells TechCrunch, “What we’re trying to do is take all that knowledge, all the methodology that we’ve created over the years of building all these big companies, and really trying to democratize it.”
The idea is that “everyday entrepreneurs” may sense a shift is afoot but may not be keen to experiment with so-called AI agents or know how to reach customers. Audos is more than happy to help them, supplying these non-technical founders with AI tools to build sophisticated products using natural language, and taking advantage of social media algorithms to find them their niche customers.
“Facebook and a lot of these platforms, they are just incredible algorithms, and they’re incredible at figuring out [how to reach your customer] if you define a customer group,” says Werdelin, who co-founded Audos with his Prehype partner Nicholas Thorne. In fact, Audos uses this system to quickly test whether a founder’s business idea has sustainable customer acquisition costs.
The approach seems to be working. Audos has helped launch “low hundreds” of businesses since its beta launch, with founders discovering the platform through Instagram ads asking “Have you ever thought about starting something, but don’t know where to go?” Among them, Werdelin says, are a car mechanic who wants to help people evaluate repair quotes, an individual who is selling “after death logistics” services, virtual golf swing coaches, and AI nutritionists. In a winking reference to billion-dollar businesses, or so-called unicorns, he calls these one- and two-person teams “donkeycorns.”
All went through the same process: they clicked on Audos’s ad, its AI agent launched a conversation to figure out the problems these individuals want to tackle and who they want to serve, and, when it was satisfied with the answers, Audos got them in front of potential customers as fast as possible.
As for returns, Audos operates on a fundamentally different model than traditional accelerators or venture capital. Instead of taking equity, the company takes a 15% revenue share from the businesses it helps launch. In return, founders get up to $25,000 in funding, access to those AI-powered business development tools, and help with distribution, primarily through paid social media advertising.
“We’re not taking any equity in their business,” Werdelin says, partly because “we don’t think these companies might ever get sold. What we’re really inspired by are the mom-and-pop shops that are the backbone of our society.”
The revenue share continues indefinitely, similar to platform fees charged by Apple’s App Store. For founders, that means giving up a significant portion of their revenue in perpetuity — a 15% cut that could cost entrepreneurs hundreds of thousands of dollars over time. Some will undoubtedly see that trade-off as worthwhile; others might question whether the long-term costs justify the benefits.
Audos’s value proposition raises other questions given how quickly the landscape is changing. While Werdelin emphasizes helping founders build relationships with customers, it’s unclear how much of that crucial work the AI agents can actually handle. There’s also the matter of differentiation. As Werdelin readily acknowledges, “the world is full of these tools” and they’re getting better rapidly. What happens when entrepreneurs can access similar AI capabilities without paying a permanent revenue tax?
Audos’s VCs don’t sound worried about those scenarios. True Ventures led Audos’s $11.5 million seed round, with partner Tony Conrad explaining the appeal in a Zoom call this week. In addition to having confidence in Werdelin and Thorne, says Conrad, “I think there are just lots and lots of people” who might eagerly embrace the opportunity to work with a platform like Audos.
Conrad draws parallels to Instagram’s $1 billion exit with just 13 employees, suggesting that AI could enable even more dramatic leverage, even if Audos — which itself employs just five people altogether currently — isn’t chasing unicorns. As Werdelin explains it, “What we’re after here is the millions of people who can create million-dollar businesses or half-million dollar businesses that are real and life changing.”
Adds Werdelin separately of why he spun up Audos, “What we’re trying to do is to figure out how you make a million companies that do a million dollars turnover. That’s a trillion dollar turnover business.”
It doesn’t sound crazy. Extending the benefits of entrepreneurship to people who traditionally haven’t had access to startup capital or technical skills is an increasingly compelling proposition as traditional employment begins to feel less and less stable. “We believe that there should be somebody who goes out and really helps these smaller entrepreneurs that are building something that is not venture backable,” says Werdelin. “We believe that the world is better with more entrepreneurship.”
Audos’s other investors include Offline Venture and Bungalow Capital, along with numerous high-profile angel investors – Niklas Zennstrom and Mario Schlosser among them.
Pictured above, left to right, Audos co-founders Nicholas Thorne and Henrik Werdelin.
