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ND Nemil Dalal On Unchained

“Agents are becoming the buyer of a lot of tools. So if you're a DevTools company today, basically in a year, your buyer has changed from a human developer to an agent developer… What we're seeing is this is happening for everything else, and financial transactions with personal agents… they're going to need APIs to be able to do that simpler and easier.”

Unchained · Crypto & Web3 · October 2026

“Agents are becoming the buyer of a lot of tools. So if you're a DevTools company today, basically in a year, your buyer has changed from a human developer to an agent developer… What we're seeing is this is happening for everything else, and financial transactions with personal agents… they're going to need APIs to be able to do that simpler and easier.” — Nemil Dalal, Unchained

Context

Walking through Y Combinator's crypto request for startups, he explains the thinking behind its agent-focused theme.

Transcript

Unchained Around 20:41 into the episode
Rob Hadick

bear? Is that what we're hearing?

Tom Schmidt

No, just Dragonfly was so compelling. I said, stablecoins are great, but I got to go with this fund. I got to go allocate some capital. And, but no, that was, you know, it's been a long time.

Nemil Dalal

…privileges, et cetera, et cetera, but actually provide value and banks might run them. They might be licensed and things like that, but they'll provide value. And then the last part of the story is basically like, as soon as you do all this, it suddenly becomes an API. And so in that world, like what agents want is APIs. We actually just ran a make something agents want hackathon. Basically, agents are becoming the buyer of a lot of tools. So if you're a DevTools company today, basically in a year, your buyer has changed from a human developer to an agent developer and you're seeing. This is before almost anyone else. But what we're seeing is this is happening for everything else and financial transactions with like personal agents, Muse and others. We think pretty rapidly they're going to be starting to do financial transactions. That could be payments, it could be trading, and they're going to need APIs to be able to do that simpler and easier. And so…

Robert Leshner

Well, I'm excited about this category.

Rob Hadick

You know, Namio, I like the way you started that too, because I've had this thing I've been telling people for a little bit, which is like, it feels to me very much like we're in a bull run, just like not a bull run of token prices, right? And like, that's a big, so, or as I put it before, it's the…

Nemil Dalal

steal that. I love that framing.

Speaker names come from our own diarization. The position is estimated from where the line sits in the episode.

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