START pod: Manav Modi, CEO & Co-Founder, AgentPhone “Phone numbers for AI Agents”

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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

Manav Modi & cofounder Meet Modi built AgentPhone to fix that

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

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🎙️ Manav Modi, Co-Founder, AgentPhone on Fondo START pod

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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

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Check out agentphone.ai