AI agents can write code, analyze data, and pass the bar exam
They can't order you a pizza because they don't have a phone number
Think about how much of the real world still runs on phone numbers
SMS verification
Delivery coordination
Account creation
Calling a business...
Without one, an agent is stuck behind glass
Give your agent a phone number and it can suddenly act
He told his agent to order DoorDash
It created an account, talked to the delivery driver, made the payment
Pizza showed up at his door.
Y Combinator is a customer. After An engineer tried Twilio and got buried in compliance, AgentPhone had him live in a day
Every person will soon have hundreds, maybe thousands of agents working for them
The hard part isn't making them smart
It's giving them the tools to touch the real world
🎙️ Manav Modi, CEO & Co-Founder, AgentPhone on Fondo START pod
00:57 Why AI agents need phone numbers to interact with the real world
01:24 The tools that move agents closer to human-level autonomy
01:50 The emerging infrastructure stack powering AI agents
02:18 Why payments may become a critical layer for autonomous agents
02:42 An AI agent ordering DoorDash end-to-end without human involvement
03:08 What happened when 100+ developers built on AgentPhone
03:26 Processing 4,000+ calls and 5,000+ messages in a single day
03:43 Unexpected real-world use cases discovered during the hackathon
04:24 How phone numbers unlock authentication and action
05:37 The vision of every person having hundreds or thousands of agents
06:16 Building identity and authentication systems for AI agents
07:31 The startup pivot that led to AgentPhone and ultimately YC