Three founders raise $6 million to build a company with no employees
Swan has grown to 200 customers using what it calls an AI “GTM Engineer.”
Most startups raise capital in order to hire. Swan says it raised $6 million to prove it doesn’t have to.
The young company, founded by Amos Bar-Joseph, Niv Oppenhaim and Ido Goldberg, closed a $6 million round led by Link Ventures, with participation from Fresh Fund, Collider and Gandel Invest. The funding backs what the company describes as a structural rethink of how businesses scale in the age of artificial intelligence.
Swan ended 2025 with more than 200 customers across five continents and a reported $1.5 million in monthly pipeline. It has no employees beyond its three founders.
“Most startups raise capital to hire. Swan just raised $6 million to prove it doesn't need to,” the company wrote in its press release.
Bar-Joseph, Swan’s co-founder and CEO, has previously sold four companies. At his last startup, wherever.im, he worked alongside Oppenhaim, now Swan’s CTO, and Goldberg, now its CPO. Wherever.im was later acquired by Push Chain.
Rather than assembling a larger organization after their previous exit, the trio decided to test a different thesis: that artificial intelligence allows companies to separate growth from headcount.
“We don't think the next competitive edge is hiring faster,” Bar-Joseph said. “It's relocating engineering burden into systems. Swan is built to scale with intelligence, not headcount.”
Swan’s product is described as an “AI GTM Engineer” - a coding agent built for go-to-market professionals rather than developers.
Swan describes its approach as separating “human execution (judgment, prioritization, accountability)” from “engineering burden (maintenance, orchestration, technical upkeep).” Its AI GTM Engineer carries the latter.
In a LinkedIn post announcing the round, Bar-Joseph framed the ambition in broader terms:
“For 100 years, scaling a business meant one thing: hiring more people. But an autonomous business runs on a different equation.”
He continued: “A business designed from the ground up to scale with intelligence, not headcount. Not automation layered on top of old structures. A new architecture: human + AI collaboration at the core, intelligence as the scaling mechanism.”
In 2025, Swan grew from zero to more than 200 customers across five continents. According to Bar-Joseph, the company achieved that with “just the 3 founders and AI agents. Zero employees. Zero SDRs. Zero marketing budget.”
He added: “Most companies need 40+ people to run a GTM operation this size. But we decided to build a different system entirely.”
The company’s next target is to reach 2,000 customers in 2026 without adding a single employee.
Whether such a model can scale sustainably remains to be seen. Growth often introduces coordination challenges, customer demands and operational complexity that test even well-designed systems.
Still, Swan’s experiment raises a larger question confronting the technology industry: if artificial intelligence can reliably absorb technical and operational work, does scaling a company still require scaling a workforce?
For now, three founders, and a set of AI agents, are attempting to find out.
