Dust hits $6M ARR helping enterprises build AI agents that actually do stuff instead of just talking

Dust, a two-year-old artificial intelligence platform that helps enterprises build AI agents capable of completing entire business workflows, has reached $6 million in annual revenue — a six-fold increase from $1 million just one year ago. The company’s rapid growth signals a shift in enterprise AI adoption from simple chatbots toward sophisticated systems that can take concrete actions across business applications.

The San Francisco-based startup announced Thursday that it has been selected as part of Anthropic’s “Powered by Claude” ecosystem, highlighting a new category of AI companies building specialized enterprise tools on top of frontier language models rather than developing their own AI systems from scratch.

“Users want more than just conversational interfaces,” said Gabriel Hubert, CEO and co-founder of Dust, in an interview with VentureBeat. “Instead of generating a draft, they want to create the actual document automatically. Rather than getting meeting summaries, they need CRM records updated without manual intervention.”

Dust’s platform goes far beyond the chatbot-style AI tools that dominated early enterprise adoption. Instead of simply answering questions, Dust’s AI agents can automatically create GitHub issues, schedule calendar meetings, update customer records, and even push code reviews based on internal coding standards–all while maintaining enterprise-grade security protocols.

The company’s approach becomes clear through a concrete example Hubert described: a business-to-business sales company using multiple Dust agents to process sales call transcripts. One agent analyzes which sales arguments resonated with prospects and automatically updates battle cards in Salesforce. Simultaneously, another agent identifies customer feature requests, maps them to the product roadmap, and in some cases, automatically generates GitHub tickets for small features deemed ready for development.

“Each call transcript is going to be analyzed by multiple agents,” Hubert explained. “You’ll have a sales battle card optimizer agent that’s going to look at the arguments the salesperson made, which ones were powerful and seem to resonate with the prospect, and that’s going to go and feed into a process on the Salesforce side.”

This level of automation is enabled by the Model Context Protocol (MCP), a new standard developed by Anthropic that allows AI systems to securely connect with external data sources and applications. Guillaume Princen, Head of EMEA at Anthropic, described MCP as “like a USB-C connector between AI models and apps,” enabling agents to access company data while maintaining security boundaries.

Dust’s success reflects broader changes in how enterprises are approaching AI implementation. Rather than building custom models, companies like Dust are leveraging increasingly capable foundation models — particularly Anthropic’s Claude 4 suite — and combining them with specialized orchestration software.

“We just want to give our customers access to the best models,” Hubert said. “And I think right now, Anthropic is early in the lead, especially on coding related models.” The company charges customers $40-50 per user per month and serves thousands of workspaces ranging from small startups to large enterprises with thousands of employees.

Anthropic’s Claude models have seen particularly strong adoption for coding tasks, with the company reporting 300% growth in Claude Code usage over the past four weeks following the release of its latest Claude 4 models. “Opus 4 is the most powerful model for coding in the world,” Princen noted. “We were already leading the coding race. We’re reinforcing that.”

The shift toward AI agents that can take real actions across business systems introduces new security complexities that didn’t exist with simple chatbot implementations. Dust addresses this through what Hubert calls a “native permissioning layer” that separates data access rights from agent usage rights.

“Permission creation, as well as data & tool management is part of the onboarding experience to mitigate sensitive data exposure when AI agents operate across multiple business systems,” the company explains in technical documentation. This becomes critical when agents have the ability to create GitHub issues, update CRM records, or modify documents across an organization’s technology stack.

The company implements enterprise-grade infrastructure with Anthropic’s Zero Data Retention policies, ensuring that sensitive business information processed by AI agents isn’t stored by the model provider. This addresses a key concern for enterprises considering AI adoption at scale.

Dust’s growth is part of what Anthropic calls an emerging ecosystem of “AI native startups”—companies that fundamentally couldn’t exist without advanced AI capabilities. These firms are building businesses not by developing their own AI models, but by creating sophisticated applications on top of existing foundation models.

“These companies have a very, very strong sense of what their end customers need and want for that specific use case,” Princen explained. “We’re providing the tools for them to kind of build and adapt their product to those specific customers and use cases they’re looking for.”

This approach represents a significant shift in the AI industry’s structure. Instead of every company needing to develop its own AI capabilities, specialized platforms like Dust can provide the orchestration layer that makes powerful AI models useful for specific business applications.

The success of companies like Dust suggests that the enterprise AI market is moving beyond the experimental phase toward practical implementation. Rather than replacing human workers wholesale, these systems are designed to eliminate routine tasks and context-switching between applications, allowing employees to focus on higher-value activities.

“By providing universal AI primitives that make all company workflows more intelligent as well as a proper permissioning system, we are setting the foundations for an agent operating system that is future-proof,” Hubert said.

The company’s customer base includes organizations convinced that AI will fundamentally change business operations. “The common thread between all customers is that they’re pretty stemmed towards the future and convinced that this technology is going to change a lot of things,” Hubert noted.

As AI models become more capable and protocols like MCP mature, the distinction between AI tools that simply provide information and those that take action is likely to become a key differentiator in the enterprise market. Dust’s rapid revenue growth suggests that businesses are willing to pay premium prices for AI systems that can complete real work rather than just assist with it.

The implications extend beyond individual companies to the broader structure of enterprise software. If AI agents can seamlessly integrate and automate workflows across disconnected business applications, it could reshape how organizations think about software procurement and workflow design—potentially reducing the complexity that has long plagued enterprise technology stacks.

Perhaps the most telling sign of this transformation is how naturally Hubert describes AI agents not as tools, but as digital employees that show up to work every day. In a business world that has spent decades connecting systems with APIs and integration platforms, companies like Dust are proving that the future might not require connecting everything—just teaching AI to navigate the chaos we’ve already built.