Damien Tanner
Damien C. Tanner is an individual serial software founder, angel investor, and technical writer—not a company. He currently co-founded and serves as CEO of Toyo, while publishing practical work on AI agents, retrieval, tool calling, and AI infrastructure.
At a Glance
- Founders and operators of small businesses with fewer than 100 employees
- Non-technical business owners who need operational automation without managing agent infrastructure
- Technical early adopters and developers interested in local/self-hosted AI-agent workspaces
AI Tools by Damien Tanner
(1)
Jelly
Open Source Local AI Agents
Discussions
No discussions yet
Be the first to start a discussion about Damien Tanner
Latest News
Jelly made its initial public release as a local multi-bot agent system.
Toyo announced a $4.3 million seed round to build an AI-agent platform for founders.
BetaKit reported Toyo's pivot from Layercode voice infrastructure to an OpenClaw-like tool for founders and described its sandboxed browser/app automation.
Damien published 'LLM tool calling as code blocks,' describing a regex- and schema-validation approach to tool calls.
Products & Services
AI-agent platform co-founded by Damien that runs agents continuously on a secure cloud computer to research, write, conduct outreach, update websites, read metrics, and operate connected business tools. Official sources describe it as an AI agent/platform for founders: https://toyo.ai/ and https://toyo.ai/blog/seed-round-announcement.
Open-source local-first workspace for persistent multi-bot agents, built with Bun, React, SQLite, and the Pi agent harness. It runs on a Mac, Linux box, or VM and provides a local web UI, browser control, shell tools, subagents, MCP connections, uploads, images, and artifacts: https://github.com/dctanner/jelly.
An AI voice-infrastructure product co-founded by Damien, Stuart Bowness, and Aidan Hornsby before the team pivoted to Toyo after about ten months (https://betakit.com/toyo-raises-seed-funding-to-further-develop-openclaw-for-founders-tool/).
Market Position
Damien's work spans two complementary positions: Toyo is described as an OpenClaw-for-founders tool that makes agentic business operations accessible to non-technical operators through a secure cloud computer, while Jelly is a local-first, self-hosted alternative for users who want direct control of agent workspaces. The relevant comparison set includes OpenClaw and other agentic workflow/orchestration tools; Toyo differentiates on delegation, sandboxing, browser/app access, and founder-oriented workflows, while Jelly differentiates on local ownership and extensibility (https://betakit.com/toyo-raises-seed-funding-to-further-develop-openclaw-for-founders-tool/ and https://github.com/dctanner/jelly).
Leadership
Executive Team
Damien Tanner
CEO and Co-founder, Toyo
Serial founder who previously co-founded Pusher, MediaCore, New Bamboo, and Panda; Pusher was acquired by MessageBird and MediaCore by Workday. Toyo's official About page lists him as CEO and co-founder: https://toyo.ai/about.
Founding Story
Damien describes a career that began with building applications for the Linux GNOME distribution on the HP iPAQ (LinkedIn search result: https://uk.linkedin.com/in/dctanner). He went on to co-found New Bamboo, Panda, Pusher, and MediaCore, and later started Toyo after the founding team realized that the AI agents they were using to run their voice-AI company were more interesting than the original product; Toyo's official announcement says they replaced their CRM, email automation, and website tools with agents.
Business Model
Revenue Model
Toyo is presented as a paid replacement for business SaaS workflows, but public sources reviewed do not state its pricing or billing model. Jelly is MIT-licensed open-source software; running it requires the user's ChatGPT subscription or OpenAI API key (https://github.com/dctanner/jelly).
Target Markets
- Founders and operators of small businesses with fewer than 100 employees
- Non-technical business owners who need operational automation without managing agent infrastructure
- Technical early adopters and developers interested in local/self-hosted AI-agent workspaces
- Non-technical founders and operators of companies with fewer than 100 employees who want agents to run business operations (https://toyo.ai/blog/seed-round-announcement).
- CRM, sales outreach, email follow-up, website updates, competitor research, and business analytics automation (https://betakit.com/toyo-raises-seed-funding-to-further-develop-openclaw-for-founders-tool/).
- Founders or small teams wanting a self-hosted/local workspace for persistent AI agents on a Mac, Linux machine, or VM (https://github.com/dctanner/jelly).
- AI experimentation, model training, and independent research using an affordable personal or colocated GPU server (https://dc.tanner.me/blog/building-an-ai-superserver/).