Why He Turned Down OpenAI’s Near-Million-Dollar Job Offer

Key Takeaways

- Div Garg turned down a nearly $1 million OpenAI offer to build his own AI startup: AGI Inc.

- He bet that a startup gives more ownership and impact than a role at a big AI company.

- AGI Inc is working on a voice-driven AI “Siri that actually works” for phones, and saw 500,000 people sign up for the waiting list in about three months.

Div Garg, a Stanford University dropout, was thinking of building his own AI company when OpenAI came calling. He was faced with a choice: accept a near-million-dollar job offer from OpenAI to work on someone else’s projects or create his own AI company and tackle the pain points in AI that mattered most to him.

He chose the startup path and has since founded AGI Inc., a startup focused on building AI agents that can run on mobile devices. The company raised its first funding round, an $8 million pre-seed/seed round, in June 2025 and is currently raising another round, details of which are still undisclosed. Garg wants to build something like an advanced Siri, he tells Entrepreneur in a new interview. His app has received around 500,000 signups for the waiting list in three months.

This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and concision.

Div Garg. Credit: William Yu

His beginnings

Can you start from the beginning of your career in AI?

I’ve been in the AI space for almost a decade. I worked at several big tech companies, including Google, Apple and Nvidia, on top-secret AI projects at the time, involving things like self‑driving cars, robotics, and related areas.

After that, I was doing a PhD in AI at Stanford, working on reinforcement learning and building agents. I’ve accumulated over 3,000 citations and probably more than 10 patents. I eventually dropped out of my Stanford PhD to start my first company.

What was the first company you started?

Initially, I started a company called MultiOn, which I ran for about two years. We raised over $30 million from top VCs in the Bay Area, including Joe Lonsdale’s 8VC, Catalyst, Foreign Ventures, and a number of VPs from OpenAI, DeepMind and others.

Recently, I spun a new lab out of that company, and that became AGI Inc. Now we’re focused on building a more research‑first and trustworthy AI product.

His startup’s focus

What is AGI Inc. focused on now?

We’re focused on building agents that can run on your own devices, on the edge, and bringing a personal assistant to every phone and every device.

At its core, it’s, ‘Can I talk to my phone, and can it do things for me automatically?’ We think the future is an “appless” phone, where instead of you manually using apps, everything just happens automatically through an AI assistant. We want to enable that future.

A huge portion of our lives is now digital. Most people spend something like 80% of their time on phones, computers, and other devices. There are countless small, repetitive, and boring tasks in that digital life. We wanted to build an AI that could automate those repetitive tasks so you can focus on what you actually care about.

Our core product is an AI that can operate your phone using natural language. Think of Siri, but it actually works. It doesn’t constantly make mistakes, and it works across any app.

You can say things like: “call me an Uber to my office,” “book me a dental appointment,” “order my favorite coffee,” and “reply to my emails.”

Basically, anything you do on your phone today, we aim to let you do hands‑free, using your voice, through the AI. That’s the product that originally had 160,000 people on the waitlist. We now have about 500,000.

Imagine everyone having a “super assistant” that handles all of those tasks automatically. We felt that it was possible and that we were at the right moment technologically to build it. That’s why we started this journey.

Why he turned down OpenAI

You turned down a near‑million‑dollar job offer from OpenAI to start AGI. Tell me more about that decision.

I’ve always been excited about creating something of my own that can have a lot of impact. Startups are uniquely suited for that.

In a big company, you’re often a cog in the wheel. It’s hard to have real decision‑making power; you’re usually solving problems that have already been defined and prioritized. I wanted to work in a new field where not many people were working yet, so I could approach it from first principles and do something genuinely novel.

Running my own startup lets us focus obsessively on making users happy, deciding which use cases we should solve, and building a truly great company around agents. That autonomy and potential for impact were key reasons I chose the startup over the job.

What deciding factor ultimately made you say no to a million dollars?

We were already getting amazing traction. Users loved what we were building. I even ran a poll on Twitter, where I have a large following of over 22,000 followers, asking whether I should join OpenAI or pursue the startup. About 500 people responded,