Building the "Stripe" for AI: How Toolhouse is Fixing a Broken System w/ Daniele Bernardi | E135

Imagine AI Podcast

Daniele Bernardi, CEO and Co-Founder of Toolhouse, joins Chris Madden live at Imagine AI Live 2025 to talk about how his company is radically simplifying AI agent deployment. If you’ve ever felt overwhelmed by building with inference, RAG, memory, and hosting tools from scratch — this episode is for you. Daniele breaks down how Toolhouse acts as the “Toyota of AI” — giving developers a full-stack backend-as-a-service for agentic infrastructure. It’s a candid and insightful chat about why Toolhouse exists, how it’s making AI development easier for startups and enterprises alike, and why developer experience will define the winners of the AI era. (0:00) Intro & Daniele’s AI freeway analogy (1:23) Why Toolhouse exists: the Stripe of AI infrastructure (2:46) Daniele’s origin story: Twitter, DevRel, and frustration (4:10) The complexity of building with modern AI stacks (5:10) Why simplicity = value: the Stripe comparison (6:33) How Toolhouse works: backend-as-a-service for agents (8:20) Tooling, integrations, and ease of deployment (9:22) The future: tiny AI teams and lean companies (12:13) Why dev experience matters more than the model (13:00) Final thoughts and Toolhouse.ai signup