Cowboy, a New York startup building an app store for AI agents, has raised a $5 million seed round, according to a company announcement distributed through Business Wire on Nov. 4, 2026. The company opened its General Store the same day, pitching it as a place where developers can earn money from the agents and data feeds they build.
Shine Ventures was named among the investors. Beyond that, the announcement offers little on the money itself.
What launched
As of Nov. 4, the store listed more than 100 agents and 10,000 data feeds, according to the company's release. A caveat is worth noting: the release's opening paragraph cites "more than 10,000" items, but that figure also counts skills and models, so it does not measure agents alone.
Developers can work through Cowboy's command-line tool alongside existing coding agents, including Claude Code and Codex, the company's website says. Part of the platform remains unfinished, however. Cowboy said its mainnet, the live network layer meant to run the system, is planned for later in fall 2026.
Security claims
Cowboy's homepage describes a review process called Marshal, which it says every store actor passes through. It also says that hires run reviewed code, that network access is confined to hosts listed in a manifest, that private files are encrypted, and that secrets sit in a threshold store. All of this is the company's own description. No independent audit has been published in the material reviewed.
Founder and team
Chad DePue, who also goes by Charles DePue on his personal site, is an author of Cowboy's protocol whitepaper. The material reviewed does not explicitly establish his role as the company's founder. A profile on the a16z speedrun site, tied to his earlier startup Sitch, lists him as a former Uniswap vice president, Snap senior director, Whisper chief technology officer and Uncommon Projects general partner. It credits him with building Snap Kit, Games, Snap Minis and Music.
His self-reported CV goes further, saying his responsibilities at Snap included Security, Messaging, Memories, Snap Kit, Creative Tools and Music. None of these details has been independently verified.
Ryan Chan is head of product, according to reporting by Alex Konrad at Upstarts Media. A Cowboy protocol whitepaper dated Nov. 5, 2026, names DePue, Patrick Mandia, Tony Xia, Martin Aceto, Logan Lamb and Chan as authors. Authorship alone does not establish anyone's title or employment status.
Funding details
The company's release does not state a valuation, and none turned up in the available research. Dealroom's profile shows a $20 million to $30 million enterprise value, but with no date or supporting disclosure, so it should not be read as the valuation of this round. Cowboy also did not disclose when the round closed.
Competition
The big cloud providers already run agent marketplaces. AWS Marketplace offers prebuilt agent products, according to Amazon's buyer documentation, and Google Cloud has made partner-built agents available in Gemini Enterprise, according to a company blog post.
Cowboy, by its own positioning, is pitching developers on an independent store with its own payment and security model.
What's next
The mainnet launch is the company's next stated milestone. Cowboy did not say, in the material reviewed, how it will divide the $5 million between hiring and development.
