Naïve raised $28.5M to automate the grunt work of setting up and running a company, and the first thing I did was go read what they actually mean by grunt work. Incorporation filings. State tax registration. Payroll onboarding, vendor portals, bank account setup, the annual report nobody remembers until the late fee shows up. It’s an accurate list of what eats a founder’s week.

It’s also, almost item for item, a list of things with no API.

Same news cycle, SAP put $5.2B on n8n. So money is arriving at both ends of business-process automation right now: the workflow-orchestration end and the just-do-my-back-office end. The tasks underneath both are sitting exactly where they sat in 2011, which is a form on a portal that a state agency contracted out once and has not meaningfully touched since.

Go open a state tax registration portal and look at it

Pick any of them. California’s EDD e-Services, Texas Comptroller Webfile, New York’s Business Express. What you get is a multi-page wizard where every URL is the same servlet endpoint with a session-scoped GUID, so you cannot bookmark step 4 or send someone a link to it. The form times out after fifteen minutes of inactivity and throws away what you typed, which is a crap experience for a human and an actively hostile one for anything scripted. Half the fields are conditionally revealed by JavaScript that fires on blur, not on change, so setting a value programmatically without a real focus event leaves the next section invisible. Somewhere in the middle there’s a PDF upload with a file-size limit stated in a tooltip. At the end, a confirmation number appears exactly once, on a page you cannot navigate back to, and if you didn’t screenshot it you get to call a phone number staffed between 8 and 4:30.

None of that is a data problem. All of it is a browser problem, and the browser it needs is one where you’re already signed in as the officer of record.

Nobody is shipping an API for this

APIs get built where the operator gets something out of them. Stripe wants your integration. A county clerk’s office does not want your integration; they want the fee and the correctly formatted PDF. The economics never point toward a public endpoint, and no amount of venture funding downstream changes the incentive upstream.

Even the vendors that do publish APIs tend to leave the exact step you need out of it. Payroll platforms will happily let you read employee records. The onboarding flow where you attest to a state withholding account, upload a voided check, and accept terms is UI-only, because it’s the part with legal weight attached.

The thing server-side automation has to do before it types a single character

Rebuild you.

SSO and MFA are the actual wall

Any cloud automation starts from zero identity. To touch your Gusto account or your Mercury dashboard it needs to hold your credentials, receive and consume your TOTP or push approval, survive whatever device-binding cookie your IdP dropped six months ago, and not trip the impossible-travel rule when a Virginia datacenter signs in as someone whose last session came from a laptop in Oakland. That’s a credential-vaulting security product with a compliance surface, built as a prerequisite, before the first field gets filled. And when the portal rotates its login flow, the whole reconstruction breaks in a way you find out about from a failed filing.

A browser agent working inside the tab you’re already authenticated in skips all of it. The session exists. The cookie is there. MFA happened this morning when you signed in like a person. That’s the shape Dassi takes: a Chrome side panel that acts in the tab you have open, using the login state you already have, with no OAuth grant and no stored password. We’ve written before about why agents that can’t see your logins are stuck and about browser agents standing in where no API exists, and back-office filing is the cleanest example either post could have used.

What I think Naïve is really selling

Not automation. Coverage. Somebody has to know that Delaware franchise tax is due March 1 and that the calculation method they default you into is usually the expensive one. That knowledge is worth $28.5M more than the clicking is.

But the clicking still has to happen, and it happens in a browser session that belongs to a specific human being. If you’re doing this yourself instead of hiring it out, the fastest version is an agent sitting in the tab with you, filling the wizard while you watch it and catching the confirmation number before it evaporates. Dassi is free on the Chrome Web Store and runs on your own model key or your existing ChatGPT login.

Anyway. My registered agent still emails me PDFs. Progress arrives unevenly.