Apply to Betaworks' Fall '26 AI Camp: The New Agentic Economy

tl;dr: Abundant intelligence will result in radical change in both companies and our economy.

‍Apply to H2 2026 camp if you are building: 

• Novel forms of organization that assume AI at the core
• Products that are responsive to highly likely second-order effects of an AI-native economy
• Steering and certifying human + agentic systems — compounding effects in trusted outcomes 
• New marketplaces for non-human consumers
• AI that breaks out of the computer and is given the ability to interact with the physical world

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It is often confusing and exhausting to observe the incongruity between innovation in the field of AI and the magnitude of the tangible impact it has had thus far in the world of work, commerce, and leisure. We’ve gotten basically everything we wanted: nearly all investment capital has realigned to ensure that GPUs are matched with power and human ingenuity such that the capability frontier (however jagged) continues to advance. We’ve seen powerful results in new mathematics and we expect that to continue and expand throughout the sciences. Systems that were initially inert and of limited utility without human prodding continue to show new abilities to be autonomous. 

The structure and nature of the vast majority of jobs and companies however, are substantially the same as they were 24 months ago.  That’s cool, actually. It’s both a feature and a bug. It’s allowed us to see in a more controlled experiment what happens to things like software development and SaaS when their foundations have been rearchitected in vivo. It’s allowed us to see what happens to the market cap of a handful of public companies when the market comes to realize the triviality of their defensive position. It has also allowed us to see rapid job dislocation in a microcosm within the software engineering profession. But the presumption of a bottleneck in intelligence is built into the entire global economy. It is built into the structure of organizations, the size of teams, the nature of jobs, laws, human relationships. Our assumption is that the backpressure of abundant intelligence across nearly all domains will result in radical change in the arrangement of our economy in the coming decade and we want to put a lot of chips down on this thesis. 

In the past year (especially in our Camp program) we have seen some entrepreneurs experiment with new ways of working, building organizations, and driving revenue. Our Camp mandate for H2 2026 is to double down on this experimentation. We think that companies that best anticipate the impact of AI at the most intrinsic level will not just be resilient to the tsunami on the horizon, but will reap spectacular returns from it. 

What does this actually mean? Historically, we have spent a ton of time engaging with founders in the application process on how novel the thing they are making is, and we’ve ended up investing in some amazing things because of it. Our focus in this Camp will shift slightly to understanding the novelty in the strategies you are using to build your company, and irrespective of its application surface, how do you use AI systems to generate value and outcomes designed for this new future.

Who Should Apply?

Here are some examples of ideas we think are worth exploring (many of these things are obvious, many can be made more radical when pushed to their extremes — apply and let’s talk about them): 

There will be an explosion in the diversity of new kinds of organizations and companies that are newly formed with the presumption of AI at the core. In our last camp, we saw our first company with an AI cofounder that intends to scale with a single human in the loop (and to shed that human when they are no longer necessary). Think that’s dumb? Have a better idea about how to make companies that spend more on tokens than people? Apply and let us know. Some of the coolest founders we know are figuring out how to make dark factories for software, where the bots burn through massive specs and projects overnight. Do you think you can amass an army of agents to do something else besides crap out code? Apply. Rolling up traditional services companies and replacing expensive and unreliable humans with machines from the inside out has been on the whiteboard since GPT-2. It’s time to take this idea seriously, and we want to meet people who are interested not as much in labor arbitrage but in delivering a new kind of services offering that combines machine and human strengths. We know the bots can do basic bookkeeping and write marketing copy, but we want to hear your ideas on how to construct a company that will win competitively and create compounding, high quality output. 

The integration of AI into the economy will require a dramatic strengthening of the reliability of the human/machine boundary. The entire Fortune 500 class of companies has had an internal AI mandate for at least a year. This has resulted in the sale of a ton of licenses for enterprise ChatGPT, and undoubtedly countless company town halls where a handful of middle managers are roundly applauded for constructing prompts that generate quarterly sales reports and social media slop. But for the rest of the employees in those companies to not hate that their managers are now forcing them to pointlessly tokenmaxx to save their jobs, we’re going to need to solve the human in the loop problem, like for real this time. This means building the systems that solve the last mile of business verification so that people don’t get fired because the models hallucinated a compliance policy, new kinds of computing surfaces so that the outputs of hours of LLM burn are more legible and traceable than an 80 page deep research report. It means solving an encoding of the task surface of human labor in a way that is comprehensible to both humans and machines. We probably shouldn’t be using CLI harnesses to run our finance back office, but here we are. Apply and send help. 

There will be new kinds of marketplaces that have non-human participants. Black box algos trade trillions in volume daily because the financial markets were re-envisioned as programmatic data surfaces decades ago. The reason why agents aren’t buying toilet paper (idk maybe they are) or cancelling your Netflix subscription or selling your car is because the place where most of that stuff happens now (the http web) was designed for humans and has been openly hostile to a kind of malicious bot that sought to undermine it (cf. captchas). Now it’s kind of trivial (in some ways more than others) to give a claw some money. But today it would be kind of pointless to let a nanoclaw run your household or small business purchasing because most of the problems for that kind of world remain unsolved. Handily, those problems are not strictly problems of intelligence. Things like llms.txt and a2a portend an agentic web of some kind, and honestly we aren’t exactly sure what it will look like, which is why we want to hear your ideas about it. Pls apply thx. 

The world of atoms will remain economically important and AI systems will eventually apprehend and manipulate it fully. This might be a hot take, but at least for the next decade, people will still need to eat food to survive, it will take energy and vehicles to get people and things to the places where they need to go, and humans will continue to enjoy physical goods that occupy space in the universe. Weird, right? But to reorient the entirety of the economy, non-human intelligent systems will increasingly escape the domain of the virtual because there’s a lot of money to be made in atoms. Of course it’s robots. But we also want to hear about your ideas for new kinds of factories, supply chains, sensor systems, physical perception tech, and wacky hardware things we can attach to our bodies and homes. 

The reorientation of human systems and societies as a consequence of AI will create multitrillion dollar challenges and opportunities. It’s a strange process, emotionally and intellectually, to look at the tools you have access to now and to think about how they make jobs that you’ve had previously (jobs for which you might have been paid decently) kind of pointless and irrelevant. We’re optimistic though, that we will have choices to make about what to keep, and what to shed in the human remit (and that what we shed will largely be the agonizing, annoying, dangerous). Figuring out the best uses for people in a world of abundant new kinds of intelligences will require the kind of creative entrepreneurship we are most excited about investing in. There are billions of humans with neurons in need of a weight update (education, re-skilling) so that they can be tuned for the coming change. We (and really the rest of the species) want to hear your ideas about how to manage the human aspects of the coming transition, and how to anticipate and mitigate the problems of a new economic architecture with a new foundation. Capital is already pulled toward this new physics, and it would be a shame if the economy as a whole aligned completely to the current centralizing forces of terascale public offerings and closed weight foundation models. Harder still will be fighting the degradation of the information environment by the shit colored slop avalanche. Submit your ideas for preserving the last vestiges of humanity here (exercises in futility encouraged commensurate with their audacity).

The Camp application is open now through July 31st, with a priority deadline of July 24th.

Apply here: beta.works/newagenteconomy

How Camp Works

Camp is a 12-week, in-person program at Betaworks in NYC. International companies are welcome to apply but must be willing to relocate to New York for at least a portion of the program. 

Key Dates: Monday August 31, 2026 - Friday November 20, 2026. Demo Day takes place the week of November 16th.

Participating companies receive:

• Up to $500K in investment
• Dedicated 1:1 time with Betaworks partners 
• Support from experts in product, GTM, design, business operations, and fundraising
• Curated programming: workshops, founder roundtables, pitch practice and speed-dating with investors
• Mentorship from industry veterans and a built-in community of fellow founders 
• Physical office space in NYC’s Meatpacking District
• A capstone Demo Day in front of a room of the best investors

Deal specifics: Each participating company will receive investment up to $500k. Betaworks Ventures will invest up to $250k on an uncapped SAFE note with a 25% discount, and receive a 5% common stock stake in the business. Our syndicate partners will be adding up to $250k total on uncapped SAFEs with the same 25% discount.

Apply now!

What founders are saying about Camp:

"We started Huggingface at a Betaworks Camp so couldn't recommend this enough!" - Clement Delangue, Hugging Face

"it’s an honor to now be among an elite group of founders who were lucky enough to experience the awesomeness of betaworks!" - Jeremie Miller, sol pbc

"It was one of those rare accelerator experiences where the value wasn’t just advice, but sharper thinking, better questions, and a room full of people genuinely pushing the frontier." - Sacha Arozarena, weXare

"Betaworks is a special place, made that way by special people. It sits at the centre of a community, which we at Inanimate are thrilled to be part of. - Daniel Fogg, Inanimate

"I knew I wanted Betaworks on Sky Valley's cap table from day zero." - Noam Tenne, Sky Valley

"Betaworks is one of the best partners to build with." - Soren Wrenn, Titles

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