I Turned Down a Near-Million Dollar Job With OpenAI. Now My App Has 500,000 People On the Waitlist.

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.

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