Introducing Runner

It was December 28th. I woke up at 6am and Cursor had been running all night. I had Claude working while I slept, writing code, pushing commits, doing things that would have taken me a full day. Just sitting there staring at the screen, coffee getting cold, and realizing life wasn't going to be the same.

I got a taste of the agentic workflow and couldn't go back.

Turns out I wasn't the only one. When the Christmas break ended, Charlie and Yitong, my co-founders at Agora, had similar epiphanies. We all felt the same thing: AI had crossed a line. Not the "wow this is cool" line. The "I can't work the old way anymore" line. So we started building. Nights and weekends at first, then all the time. Before we knew it, we had a prototype. We showed it to a few friends. They showed it to their friends. And here we are.

Today we're launching Runner.

Here's the problem we couldn't stop thinking about. Life is busy. You have emails, Slack, WhatsApp, Notion, CRMs, Google Drive, calendars, iMessage. All of these apps, all of these conversations, and a growing list of things that need to get done. AI was the promise to fix it all.

But it didn't fix it.

You still copy and paste. You still bounce back and forth, moving context from one place to another. You still connect and re-connect the same apps over and over. You still deal with AI that is more chatty and less do-y. You ask it to help and it gives you a nice paragraph explaining what you should do, as if you hadn't already thought of that.

We were tired of it.

Runner is different because we built it to be different. Not different as in "here's another AI wrapper with a new coat of paint." Different as in, we use this thing every single day and we're not being polite about it.

Every morning I open Runner and it organizes our day. It scans email, calendar, WhatsApp, Slack, and iMessage for open commitments and tells me what I owe people. It plans my week. It runs the marketing campaigns and tracks performance across platforms. Last week I used it to incorporate a new business in Ontario through browser automation. It filled out every form while I was on another call.

If our friends at OpenAI or Anthropic check my weekly retention on their products, it's gone down.

Because of Runner.

What makes it special?

Runner is action oriented. We spent a ton of time on how your task gets interpreted, delegated, and passed between your apps. We benchmark it every week. It gets better each session.

Runner remembers. We built first class memory into the product. Not the "oh I forgot everything from yesterday" kind. Real memory. Team memory. The kind where it learns how you work and gets smarter the more you use it.

Runner runs on your computer. It accesses the cloud but lives locally. This means it can work across Word, Excel, text messages, Apple Reminders, and files sitting on your desktop. It's like an AI superapp with access to your machine and the cloud.

Runner drives your browser. We have a built-in system that automates browser tasks for you. Most people haven't tried this before. When you do, it changes everything.

Runner stays connected. We invested a ton of time into making sure your apps connect and stay connected. No more re-authenticating every other day. It just works.

Runner automates. Stitch together complex workflows between apps and files, put them on a schedule, and Runner makes sure they run. You get notified when the work is done.

Privacy first of course, in final SOC2 audits. We're CASA audited. Privacy and security aren't afterthoughts. We built your checks and balances into the product from day one.

Now, some of you are going to ask: what about Agora? Agora is alive and well. The crypto market is tough right now, no one is pretending otherwise, but the business is profitable, growing, and very much open. We have an amazing GM driving things forward day to day and we're proud of what that team continues to build. Runner doesn't replace Agora. It came from the same team, the same instincts, and the same obsession with building tools that actually work. We're not leaving one thing to chase another. We're doing both.

It's one of those rare times where we're using something we built, all the time, and now have no excuse not to make it the best thing we've ever worked on. That's the feeling you want as a founder. When the thing you're building is the thing you can't live without.

If you've tried ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, Grok, and you still feel like you're doing the heavy lifting, give Runner a try. Compare the output. We promise you won't be disappointed.

Expect more from us over the next few weeks about what this thing can do. We're just getting started.

There's more work tomorrow. Enjoy tonight.