About Cua
Computer is a primitive for agents.
From our team at the frontier of research and engineering, Cua gives agents full desktops on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Android.
Our Story
We started before the hype.
When GPT-4V shipped in 2023, it lit up a new category of AI: agents that can see a screen, reason about what they're looking at, and act on it. Francesco and Dillon were at Microsoft at the time, building Windows Agent Arena, one of the first benchmarks for this kind of agent. They saw the potential early, but also the gap: no open source infrastructure existed to run these agents on real desktops.
Francesco left Microsoft in early 2025 and started with Lume, a CLI for running native macOS VMs on Apple Silicon. It hit the front page of Hacker News. That same month he founded Cua and got into Y Combinator (X25). Dillon joined shortly after.
We believe agents and their infrastructure will get commoditized, which is why we're building the open source, self-hostable layer underneath. Lume handles local macOS VMs on Apple Silicon and Cua Cloud runs sandboxes on Linux, Windows, macOS, and Android. A year in, 50,000+ engineers use Cua at companies like Google, Meta, Apple, and NVIDIA.
Journey
What happened so far.
Mar 2025
Cua is founded in San Francisco. Lume launches on Hacker News: native macOS VMs on Apple Silicon, open source from day one. Joins Y Combinator (X25).
May 2025
Cua Cloud launches. Cloud desktops for AI agents. Dillon and Morgan join the team.
Read the announcement
Jul 2025
Cua and Ollama at ICML. Francesco, Dillon, and Dan present Windows Agent Arena.
Read the paper
Sep 2025
Cua sponsors the first Computer-Use Agents track at Hack the North. 1,778 hackers compete.
Read the recap
Oct 2025
Robert and Sarina join Cua. The team moves into a new office in San Francisco.
Nov 2025
Cua and Ollama at NeurIPS in San Diego.
Nov 2025
Windows GA, macOS preview, CLI, VLM Router, and Playground all ship in a single week. Multi-OS becomes real.
Read the announcement
Dec 2025
Cua-Bench launches: a benchmark suite for evaluating computer-use agents on desktop and mobile tasks.
Visit Cua-Bench
Dec 2025
Cua organizes a hackathon with CodeRabbit and Factory in San Francisco.
Feb 2026
ClawCon in San Francisco. 700+ attendees, 20K livestream viewers. CuaBot launches: multi-player computer-use for coding agents.
Read the recap
Humans of Cua
Based in San Francisco. 50,000+ engineers use Cua at companies like Google, Meta, Apple, and NVIDIA.
Morgan Dean
Engineering
Vancouver, Canada
D
Dan Zhao
Research
New York, USA
Alumni
People who shaped Cua and moved on.
James MurdzaWhat We Believe
How we work.
Focus, eliminate uncertainty, ship with cadence
We figure out what matters most, cut the things that don't, and ship on a rhythm. Uncertainty is the enemy of progress, so we run toward it until we have answers.
— Francesco Bonacci
Open source by default
We build in the open because it makes the code better and it makes the trust real. Lume, the Agent SDK, CuaBench are all MIT-licensed. We contribute upstream when we can.
— Dillon DuPont
Own the problem end-to-end
You pick up a problem, you see it through. Root cause, fix, deploy, monitor. Nobody here says 'that's not my area.'
— Robert Wendt
Stay curious, stay humble
Nobody has all the answers in a field this new. We ask before we tell. If someone proves you wrong, that's a good day, not a bad one.
— Sarina Li
Backed By
Backed by people who've built this before.
Y Combinator and angels from the companies behind Docker, Shopify, Vercel, and more.
Y Combinatorex-Microsoftex-Dockerex-Shopifyex-Googleex-Vercel
Cua Cloud
Cloud desktops for AI agents
Linux, Windows, macOS, Android.