Toyo raises £3m seed to run cloud-hosted AI agents automating founders' operations
This article covers Toyo, an AI startup, which has raised £3m in a seed funding round to build a platform that runs continuous AI agents to handle routine business operations for founders and small teams. The funding will be used to develop secure, cloud-hosted agents that connect to apps, browse the web and manage workflows, supporting founders and small businesses in automating repetitive tasks.
Toyo, an AI startup, has raised £3 million in a seed funding round to build a platform that runs continuous AI agents to handle routine business operations for founders and small teams. The funding will be used to develop the platform’s secure cloud-hosted agents that connect to apps, browse the web, and manage workflows so founders can offload repetitive tasks.
Why it matters
Founders and small businesses increasingly face an operational burden from juggling multiple disconnected tools and manual processes. If delivered safely, persistent AI agents that can research prospects, draft content, update systems and flag decisions could materially reduce day-to-day friction and free time for strategic work.
At the same time, putting AI agents on local machines raises real security concerns: customer lists, financials and other sensitive data can be exposed if agents run in uncontrolled environments. How startups operationalise AI agents — balancing productivity gains with data protection and governance — is now a central question for adoption.
Inside the product
Toyo’s platform runs AI agents in isolated cloud environments that the company says keep data within a founder’s controlled space. Agents can connect to applications, access a browser, monitor email, research prospects, build simple websites and generate reports from business data. They operate continuously and notify founders when human approval is required, while allowing approval controls to be set.
The approach focuses on making agent behaviour auditable and separable from a user’s local device. That technical design is intended to address two common barriers: fragmentation across tools, and the security risks of running autonomous code on personal machines.
Who are the investors?
The round was led by Frontline Ventures. Participation came from iNovia Capital, Tiny Supercomputer and a group of angel investors from Amazon, Microsoft and Cloudflare.
In the announcement, Zoe Chambers, Partner at Frontline Ventures, said:
AI agents demand unique infrastructure that traditional cloud architectures aren't built for. By leveraging Cloudflare, Toyo can deliver performant and secure AI agents at scale.
The investor line-up combines institutional venture funds with strategic angels from major cloud and platform companies. That mix signals interest from both financial backers and people inside firms familiar with the operational and security challenges of deploying AI-based automation.
If you're researching potential backers in this space:
- Explore our list of AI venture capital firms in the UK
- Browse our directory of AI angel investors in the UK
Founder perspective
Toyo was founded by Damien Tanner, Stuart Bowness and Aidan Hornsby, each with more than a decade building developer tools and cloud services. Their track records include work on MediaCore and Pusher; those companies were acquired by Workday and MessageBird respectively. The team’s history in building developer-facing infrastructure informs Toyo’s focus on secure, always-on agents that integrate with existing tools.
The bigger picture
Toyo’s raise reflects a broader push to productise AI beyond single-query assistants and make it part of core business processes. The key challenges for this category are not just model capability but orchestration, security, and governance — areas investors are explicitly flagging as critical.
For UK and European founders, the deal underscores continued investor interest in startups tackling operational AI and infrastructure for agents. If Toyo and competitors can demonstrate both utility and strong data controls, the next phase of adoption could shift from lab pilots to live operational use across small business workflows.
The raise also adds to a wave of activity around agent-first tooling in Europe, where regulatory attention to data protection is high and secure deployment models will be a competitive advantage for startups and their backers.
They've invested in Toyo
Get to know these AI investors
Click here for a full list of 7,526+ startup investors in the UK