The Albany Gazette - Okou, Formerly VM0, Puts an AI Teammate, not Another Agent Runtime, on the Team

SAN FRANCISCO, CA / ACCESS Newswire / November 3, 2026 / Okou, formerly VM0, today unveiled a new brand identity, introduced its founding team and disclosed that it has raised more than US$14 million to date. It is not announcing a new round. The rebrand is built around a simple line, "More done. Same team." It captures a modest, ambitious idea: working with an AI teammate should feel less like operating a console and more like collaborating with a colleague.

For founders, marketers, agency owners and operators, the promise is straightforward: say what you want in ordinary language, get back work that matters. Okou pulls information from connected business tools, executes tasks in the cloud and helps teams turn effective practice into capabilities anyone can reuse: an institutional memory with a pulse.

AI can do more now. That raises the stakes. A business task comes with history, constraints, expectations and an audience that has to be brought along. Preparing outreach means knowing whom the team wants to reach and why the offer is relevant. Recommending a campaign means understanding both the audience and the company's priorities. Finishing either means communicating the result in a form people can not only open but act on.

Okou starts from that everyday reality.

Its lineage is developer-grade. Okou grew out of VM0, an infrastructure project begun on GitHub in November 2025. VM0 focused on the runtime needed to operate AI agents: persistent sessions, state management, storage and observability into each run. It was built for developers working with command-line agents such as Claude Code and Codex.

That substrate became the base for a broader product: an AI teammate business users can work with directly. Okou brings together task context, cloud execution, finished deliverables and shared workflows, so founders, marketers, agency owners and operators can delegate work without becoming administrators of an agent runtime. The rebrand captures that evolution, from developer plumbing to a business-facing teammate, in the tagline "More done. Same team."

Okou was founded by Ethan Zhang and Ming Li. Zhang brings experience from a major online education technology company; Li is a former Dropbox employee and a Carnegie Mellon University alum.

Okou runs on three instincts.

Context comes first. Not a cold prompt, but a room already briefed. Okou pulls in customer conversations, team decisions, documents, account history and public research, then lets the user's goal and constraints decide what happens next. It runs in the cloud, keeps going after the laptop closes, and can shoulder recurring chores through configured automations: less prompting, more progress.

Then there's the medium. A result is only useful if it arrives in the form the next person can act on: a message for a quick update, an explorable webpage for deep research, an editable doc for a proposal, a deck for a group decision. Format isn't wrapping paper. It's part of the message.

And then it compounds. Good work shouldn't die in one person's chat history. Shared agents give colleagues a common role and instructions; shared workflows capture reviewed procedures, references and output standards. Each person runs the method through their own accounts and permissions, so a good move becomes a team move.

In practice, that looks like research and decision briefs that combine internal references with public sources; reports, presentations, spreadsheets and websites calibrated to an audience; cross-tool execution such as creator and lead trackers, outreach drafts, follow-ups and business-record updates within granted permissions; and recurring work codified as shared workflows and run on schedules or supported event triggers.

Two everyday scenes show the shape of it.

A marketing lead is staring down a product campaign: product docs here, customer feedback there, last year's decisions somewhere else, competitors moving fast. Ask Okou to pull it together. It returns a sourced research report, a deck for the planning meeting and a short list of decisions the team actually needs to make. Refine it in the same conversation: shift the audience, challenge an assumption, ask for harder evidence. Then save the method, not just the output. The proposal ships. The playbook stays.

Now outbound. A founder or agency owner needs creators, or leads that look like the best customers. Ask Okou. It builds a shortlist with sources, reasons, verified contact channels where available and a next step, organized in a shared tracker. Outreach drafts come personalized and ready for a human to send. Replies arrive. Next drafts and tracker updates follow. Follow-up that follows through. When the motion works, save the targeting, research, message and follow-up rules as a shared workflow. The shortlist keeps coming. The team keeps getting sharper.

That is the meaning behind "More done. Same team." People and AI work toward a shared goal, useful context informs each action, and one person's good way of working becomes something the whole team can build on. More done. Same team. And, increasingly, the same standard.

About Okou

Okou, formerly VM0, is an AI teammate for business teams. It connects to the tools teams already use, carries out work in the cloud, delivers finished reports, presentations, documents and websites, and turns proven ways of working into shared workflows. Okou was founded by Ethan Zhang and Ming Li and is based in San Francisco. Learn more at https://okou.ai.

Media Contact
Ming Li
CMO, Okou
[email protected]

SOURCE: Okou

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(K.Jones--TAG)