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

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 & C-Founder 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 🎙️ 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 Check out agentphone.ai