Applied Compute has launched with $80 million in funding from leading investors Benchmark, Sequoia, Lux Capital, Hanabi, Neo, Elad Gil, Victor Lazarte, and Omri Casspi. The company is developing a new category of enterprise AI known as “Specific Intelligence,” enabling organizations to build proprietary in-house agent workforces powered by their own domain expertise and data.
The company’s core belief is that “generational companies aren’t built by generalists alone.” Applied Compute argues that while general-purpose models have driven impressive progress, true competitive advantage will come from specialized agents designed for a company’s specific needs, workflows, and knowledge base.
Applied Compute’s platform unlocks the latent knowledge within an organization, trains custom models using that information, and deploys dedicated AI agents that operate under the company’s ownership and control. These agents are designed to integrate directly with internal teams, continuously learning and improving within their domain.
Early adopters such as Cognition, DoorDash, and Mercor are already using Applied Compute’s systems to train and deploy new models and agents in a matter of days rather than months, achieving top-tier performance on internal evaluations and measurable business outcomes.
Unlike firms that outsource development or rely on third-party systems, Applied Compute embeds its engineers directly with client teams and has built its own training stack, agent platform, and development tools entirely in-house.
The founding team consists of former OpenAI researchers who worked on key advances in reinforcement learning and agentic systems. Co-founder Yash was a key member of the Codex agentic software engineering effort, Rhythm contributed to the first RL-trained reasoning model (o1), and Linden specialized in ML systems and infrastructure for RL training. Two-thirds of the team are former founders, with technical backgrounds spanning top AI labs and Math Olympiad achievements.
With its latest funding, Applied Compute plans to expand its team, scale deployments, and accelerate the rollout of its agent-based platform across industries.
KEY QUOTES:
“Competitive advantage comes from agents built for a specific company, with specific expertise, on specific models.”
“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.”
“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 don’t delegate or outsource. Our engineers embed within companies, working shoulder to shoulder with their teams.”
“We are building Specific Intelligence for specific work at specific companies. That will power in-house agent workforces to support their human bosses. That in turn will unlock AI’s full potential through humanity’s greatest engine of progress: thriving corporations in a free market.”
Applied Compute
