Synapse gives a founder a virtual CEO and a permanent team of AI agents that build and run the company. Free to start. Live today.
Most of starting a company has nothing to do with the idea.
A founder with a good idea still has to hire a team, ship a product, find customers and keep the whole thing running. The idea is a small part of the work. The rest is operations, and it never stops.
HireMonths before the first customer
A founding team costs six figures a year and takes months to assemble. Most ideas never get that far.
BuildEvery tool builds code
AI app builders and coding agents produce software. None of them produce a company: departments, a pipeline, revenue, memory.
OperateThe job that never ends
Support, sales, reporting, infrastructure. A second full-time job stacked on the founder's first one.
The bottleneck is not talent or capital. It is the distance between an idea and a running company.
A company you talk to.
You describe the business. Synapse sets up the company, gives it a CEO agent with written authority, permanent departments of AI agents, a real engineering workspace, a CRM and a way to get paid. You keep the board seat.
Virtual CEO
One agent runs the company and is the only one you talk to. It acts below a line you can read and change, and proposes above it. Pricing, pivots, spend and anything irreversible wait for you.
Permanent agent teams
Dev, QA, security, docs and DevOps as standing departments on your own repositories. They open merge requests; you approve them in the cabinet.
Product Factory
Templates in minutes, modular builds in hours, from-scratch builds in days. Hosted by us or deployed to your cloud accounts.
Idea to operating company, in the product today.
VC audit
Six axes including autonomy fit. FUND / WATCH / PASS computed in code. Free, no signup.
LiveCompany setup
An 8-step wizard produces the company document and hands the CEO its brief.
LiveCEO + org chart
CEO chat with its own tool loop, departments, git-backed wiki, memory that survives model changes.
LiveAgent team ships
A Claude agent team on your GitLab board. Diffs, pipelines and Merge / Deny in the cabinet.
LiveSell and get paid
Public website from day one, native CRM with lead capture, Stripe Connect to your own account.
CRM rolling outLive since 8 June 2026. Shipping every week.
- 8 JunCabinet live. Sign-up, 8-step wizard, CEO agent API with bounded authority.
- 17 AugVC audit in production. Per-company row isolation enforced at boot; secrets vault live.
- 25 AugAgent teams in production on founders' own boards, on their own Claude subscription.
- 2 SepSynapse becomes an MCP server. 33 tools, OAuth 2.1. Claude can run the company.
- 9 SepCEO runs its own tool loop. Org chart, wiki edits as reviewable diffs.
- 10 SepNative CRM with website lead capture. Rolling out.
- 16 SepModel router tells the truth: availability pills say why a model can't answer. CEO model chain with failover merging.
Every entry is a dated merge in a Synapse repository. Full list: catalation.com/changelog.
We are our own first customer.
Synapse is built by the agent team it sells. A CTO agent orchestrates dev, QA, security, docs and DevOps agents across our GitLab group. Every merge passes a read-only QA gate and a Security gate. One human merges.
Three things became true in the last eighteen months.
01Agents can ship
Coding agents now open, review and merge production changes. Our own repositories are the evidence: hundreds of merged requests written by agents.
02MCP became the standard
One protocol for giving models tools. Synapse is a native MCP server, so any MCP client, Claude first, can run a company through it.
03Inference got cheap
Routine turns run on open-weight models at a fraction of frontier cost. We already route routine engineering to one, which is what makes a $10 tier possible.
Every AI product builds the code. Nobody has built the company around it.
Five million new businesses a year, in the US alone.
# US business applications per year (Census BFS) new_businesses ≈ 5,000,000 # 1% start on Synapse companies = 50,000 # blended $50/mo across Starter and Growth ARR = $30M # same cohort at Growth ($99) ARR = $59M
WedgeSolo founders and indie hackers
Already use AI coding tools, have no team. Free tier to Starter is one conversation with the CEO.
ExpansionAgencies and studios
Many companies per customer. Platform-level economics.
LaterCorporate spinouts and holdings
On-prem and the B2B CEO network. Enterprise tier, sold not self-served.
Subscription only. No revenue share. No AI markup.
| Tier | Price | Unlocks |
|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | VC audit, company setup, CEO agent, wiki, MCP |
| Starter | $10 | Agent team, CRM, templates, Stripe Connect |
| Growth | $99 | Modular builds, custom domain, your own infra |
| Scale | $499 | From-scratch builds, compliance checks |
| Enterprise | $999 | On-prem (beta), uncapped teams, white-glove |
Team and role caps are plan entitlements, not yet hard-enforced in the product. On-prem is in beta.
- AI runs on the founder's own keys. We never resell tokens, so the largest cost in the category is not on our P&L.
- Infrastructure per active company: about $2 to $3 a month (our estimate). Growth at $99 is a ~97% gross margin.
- The free tier pays for itself when about 3% of free companies reach Growth.
- No sales team. The CEO agent starts the upgrade conversation when the company hits a limit.
- Pure B2B SaaS. Never merchant of record. Same legal footing as Vercel or GitHub.
Everyone builds the app. We run the company.
| Validates the idea | Builds the product | Runs the company | CRM · revenue · site | Your repos, your keys | Run from Claude (MCP) | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Synapse | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ | ✓ |
| AI app builders Lovable · Replit · Bolt | — | ✓ | — | — | partial | — |
| Agent orchestrators Paperclip · CrewAI | — | via agents | org chart | — | ✓ | skill file |
| No-code and commerce Bubble · Shopify | — | templates | — | store only | — | — |
Four things that compound.
MemoryThe company gets smarter
Every session adds to a memory that survives model and provider changes. The longer a company runs, the more it costs to leave.
OwnershipNothing to escape from
Work lives in the founder's git repos, keys in their vault, money in their Stripe. No lock-in means no reason to churn, and no legal exposure for us.
GovernanceA CEO you can trust
A written authority document. Propose above the line, never approve. Trust is the product; over-claiming autonomy is how the category loses it.
DistributionMCP-native
33 tools over OAuth 2.1. Every MCP client is a channel into Synapse, and the CEO agent uses the same surface external assistants do.
Every business built on Synapse is meant to be a transferable asset. The marketplace is built; transfer unlocks after a third-party security pass.
From live-and-free to paid and compounding.
Monetise
Hosted template builds live, plan caps enforced, CRM in production, durable CEO sessions. First paid cohort.
Scale builds
40 templates, modular and from-scratch builds verified in production. MCP Universe connects existing CRMs, billing and ERPs.
Marketplace
Business transfer with CEO continuity unlocked after the PII security pass. First sale of a Synapse-built company.
Enterprise
Signed on-prem release. B2B CEO protocol across deployments. Compliance entitlements per tier.
One founder. A company of agents.
Pavel Kurinnoi
Founder & CEO · CatalationDesigned Synapse and wrote its 49 architecture decision records. Built the agent harness that now ships the platform, then made that harness the product. Technical founder who runs engineering, product and go-to-market through the same CEO-and-departments model founders get on Synapse.
The team that shipsPermanent departments
First hires with this round: a founding platform engineer and a growth lead. The agent departments stay.
Raising a pre-seed round.
Eighteen months of runway to take Synapse from live-and-free to paid, and put the first thousand companies on it. Terms on request.
Use of funds
12-month milestonesWhat we will show at seed
- First paid cohort on Starter and Growth, with retention data
- 1,000 companies set up on the platform
- 40 templates and hosted builds live
- First marketplace transfer of a running business
Bring an idea. Leave with a running business.