$2.3B
Raised across 14 seed rounds
WebVan.ai is the world's first vertically-integrated, fully-autonomous, multi-modal, agentic grocery and tulip-bulb delivery platform. A quarter century later — now powered by stochastic parrots and prompt-engineered hopium.
// agentic fulfillment loop · run #41,829 · routing through 7 LLMs in a trenchcoat agent.plan("deliver 1 gallon 2% milk to 221B Baker St") ↳ thinking… (reasoning trace: 18,402 tokens) ↳ tool_call: queryVectorDB("is milk a vegetable?") → "unclear" ↳ tool_call: summonGigWorker({ urgency: "existential" }) ↳ tool_call: mintNFT({ asset: "proof-of-milk", chain: "solana" }) ↳ // model decided to also order 14,000 tulip bulbs. trust the process. ↳ status: "DELIVERED" (to wrong continent, but with high confidence) $ ▌
¹ assumes every human eats food and has a garden · ² we are calling this "growth"
Why open an app and tap "milk" when an autonomous fleet of language models can hallucinate your grocery list, reason about its own grocery list, and then forget the grocery list?
A 1.4-trillion-parameter foundation model fine-tuned on Costco receipts, Pinterest mood boards, and the entire collected works of Whole Foods signage. Recommends arugula with 97.3% confidence.
Your cart now reasons. It plans. It self-reflects. Sometimes it cries. Each item has its own agent that negotiates with neighboring items in a multi-agent simulation we call "the kitchen."
A decentralized, on-chain ledger for tulip-bulb provenance. Each bulb is a non-fungible token, each delivery a smart contract, each disappointment a permanent block on the timeline.
Retrieval-augmented generation grounded in real-time produce embeddings. Ask: "is this lettuce sad?" We embed the lettuce. We query the vector DB. The lettuce is, in fact, sad.
Self-driving cargo bikes piloted by a swarm of 4-bit quantized LLMs running on a Raspberry Pi. They take the scenic route. They are learning. They will deliver. Eventually.
The native utility token of the WebVan economy. Stake $VAN to unlock priority hallucinations. Burn $VAN to summon a gig worker. Not a security. Definitely not a security. Please.
"I want eggs." You say it once. The orchestrator sends it to 11 different model providers for "consensus."
An ensemble of agents debates whether you really want eggs or just the idea of eggs. There is a tool call for everything.
The basket is generated. The basket contains: eggs, kale, a regrettable candle, and 600 tulip bulbs. The basket is final.
A bicycle messenger named Greg, who is not in any way an LLM, hand-delivers your order while we tweet about AGI.
That thing, of course, was a transformer-based language model and a pre-money valuation approximately equal to the GDP of Portugal. We've fixed both.
| Capability | Webvan, 1999 | WebVan.ai, 2026 |
|---|---|---|
| Delivers groceries | Yes, occasionally | Yes, agentically |
| Loses money on every order | $130 per order | $1,847 per order (inference is expensive) |
| Powered by | Sun Microsystems & vibes | Stochastic parrots & prompt-engineered hopium |
| Investor pitch | "It's the internet" | "It's the internet, but for agents that use the internet" |
| Bubble adjacency | Dot-com | Dot-AI (also tulips, for the throwback fans) |
| Path to profitability | Volume | A subsequent funding round |
| Time to bankruptcy | 26 months | We don't believe in linear time anymore |
All prices are USD per month, billed in tokens, denominated in $VAN, vested over 4 years.
For early adopters who enjoy disappointment.
For prosumers, power users, and people on Twitter.
For F500s with an "AI strategy" PowerPoint due Friday.
* "Unlimited" subject to a 1,000-call/day soft cap, a 100-call/day hard cap, and a 10-call/day actual cap.
A bold, ambitious, slightly-unfalsifiable timeline. Subject to change at the speed of a tweet.
We bought webvan.ai for an undisclosed but extremely tax-deductible sum.
You are looking at it. This is the product so far.
We will not be selling groceries; we will be selling picks and shovels to the people selling groceries.
Founders will issue a heartfelt blog post titled "an exciting new chapter."
The platform achieves recursive self-improvement, orders its own groceries, and unionizes.
"WebVan.ai delivered what I asked for, eventually, and also a 50-pound bag of arborio rice I did not ask for. The arborio rice has changed my life."
"Honestly, this is the most exciting thing in tech since the last most exciting thing in tech. I have invested. I cannot stop investing. Please send help."
"The agents simulated buying my groceries with such conviction that I myself became briefly convinced I had eaten dinner. 10/10. No notes."
No. The original Webvan was a grocery delivery company that lost $1.2B and went bankrupt in 2001. We are a grocery delivery platform that has not yet had the chance to lose $1.2B. The era is different. The vibes are different. The valuation multiples are extremely different.
We mean a language model is doing it, and it occasionally calls another language model, which calls a tool, which calls back the original language model. We are agentic in the way that a hall of mirrors is decorated.
The tulip bulb is the patron saint of speculative assets. We carry it as a humble reminder, and also at a 330% markup. Bulbs ship with NFC tags so your agent can verify each bulb's on-chain provenance before ignoring it.
It's a term, originally critical, used to describe large language models that produce convincing text without understanding. We have adopted it as a brand value. Squawk responsibly.
We have considered it. We have decided against it. Profitability would compress our multiple.
It is different this time. Source: every founder, every cycle, since 1637.
Yes — we are hiring "Forward Deployed Prompt Engineers," "Head of Vibes," and "Chief Tulip Officer (CTO)." Compensation is competitive: equity, more equity, and a discount on tulip bulbs.
Join the waitlist. We'll send you a confirmation email written by a model that has, at best, a passing familiarity with your name.
* "Waitlist" defined here as "people who once searched for the word groceries."