# About Platypus

**Platypus is AI booking for phone-only businesses.** We make Main Street agent-native: one honest AI phone call makes a business bookable by every AI agent, and every booking after that is a text the owner answers with one letter.

## The problem

In one month, every lab shipped a personal agent, and then they all added phone calls. Agents can book an airline or a big-box store, but not the 33 million US small businesses that run on a phone. Those businesses will never build a website agents can use, an API, or an agent of their own. Calling is the stopgap, and every agent that calls a shop starts from zero: the shop learns nothing, and the next agent calls again. Businesses hang up on AI calls, and people still spend 15 to 25 minutes calling around for a single booking.

## What we do differently

The call is the onboarding, not the product. Everyone else calls a business every time; we call it once. On that call our voice agent says it is an AI in its first sentence, gets a price and an opening, books the job through our own tools while the owner is still on the line, and asks one question: *"Next time a customer's agent needs you, can I text you instead of calling?"* A yes is stored with the owner's exact words and the call it came from. From then on, every agent books that business by text.

Consent compounds; calls don't. Every yes becomes supply that any agent platform can route to, and every real booking teaches us what a business charges and how fast it replies.

## Who built it

Platypus was built in one day at SpeedHacks, the official speedrun hackathon of SF Tech Week, in San Francisco on October 11, 2026, by a small team working in parallel coding sessions. It is built on [Dial](https://getdial.ai) for voice calls and owner texts, [Darwin](https://darwin.so) for agent search, and [Alike](https://alike.help) for shared memory across the team's coding sessions. The code is MIT licensed on [GitHub](https://github.com/KarthikSubramanian07/Platypus).

## Why the name

A platypus fits no category and lives in two worlds. So does Main Street: on the phone and, now, online. (And yes, the most famous platypus is a secret agent. Ours books oil changes.)

## Status

Platypus is a working prototype. The booking core, the MCP gateway, the Darwin integration and the test suite are real; the demo shop's line is a second Dial number answered by Dial's AI, and texts to regular phones wait on 10DLC registration. The [README](https://github.com/KarthikSubramanian07/Platypus#what-is-real-today-and-what-is-mocked) lists exactly what is real and what is mocked.

- [Developers](/developers): connect an agent to Platypus.
- [Contact](/contact): reach the team.
- [Privacy](/privacy): what we store and why.