Generational companies aren't built by generalists alone.

If you've ever built a team, you already know this. You don't just hire any smart person. You hire specific people — those who fit your culture, master your tools, know your domain, and learn from your best.

AI is no different. While general models are impressive, they produce generalist agents: useful, but without any edge.

Competitive advantage comes from agents built for a specific company, with specific expertise, on specific models.

We're Applied Compute, and we build Specific Intelligence.

We unlock the latent knowledge inside a company, use it to train custom models, and deploy an in-house agent workforce that reports directly to your team. These agents are owned by you, deeply specialized, and continuously learning.

Sophisticated companies have already captured early gains from general models. The leaders are now pulling even further ahead with proprietary in-house agents that don't need to wait for the next public model release.

We're already seeing this with early customers including Cognition, DoorDash, and Mercor. Together we are building and validating models and agents in days instead of months, achieving state-of-the-art performance on customer evals and delivering measurable business value.

We don't delegate or outsource. Our engineers embed within companies, working shoulder to shoulder with their teams. Our training stack, agent platform, and tools are all built in-house, allowing us to do more in a fraction of the time.

Our team has high density and low latency. Our founders all worked on different parts of this problem while they were researchers at OpenAI — Yash as a key member on the agentic software engineer effort (Codex), Rhythm as a core contributor to the first RL-trained reasoning model (o1), and Linden as a core contributor on ML systems and infrastructure for RL training.

Two-thirds of the team are former founders, and everyone brings a deep technical background, from top AI researchers to Math Olympiad winners.

We are fortunate to be backed by $80m in funding from Benchmark, Sequoia, Lux, Hanabi, Neo, Elad Gil, Victor Lazarte, Omri Casspi, and others. With their support, we are growing the team, scaling deployments, and bringing to market the first generation of agent workforces built on specific models.

If our mission speaks to you, you should speak with us.

— Yash, Rhythm, Linden, and the rest of the Applied Compute team