After six years building on our own, we're joining Aiven to build the next generation of AI infrastructure, bringing everything we've built and learned with us.
How we got here
Six years ago, Karolus and I started a company because GPT-3 had convinced us that language models were the next platform shift. We initially pointed that conviction at productivity tools. Our first product, Flowrite, was one of the first products in the world built on GPT-3, with a waitlist that reached 100,000 before we had even fully launched. These days, Flowrite has a good home of its own under Maestro Labs.
While building Flowrite, we realized that AI can look great in a demo and still fall apart the moment it meets messy, real-world inputs. Closing that gap became a big part of our work with Flow AI, first building evaluation tooling and then infrastructure for running analytical agents reliably on enterprise data. We shipped much of it in flowai-harness earlier this summer.
Why now and why Aiven
Selling is never an easy decision, but we decided to join Aiven because we're convinced it's where our team and product can have the biggest impact right now.
Winning in this space takes resources, distribution and hard-won trust at a scale that takes years to build alone, and Aiven has spent a decade doing that. Their managed open-source data platform is where its customers' production data already lives. Agents belong close to the data they reason over, so putting what we do best on top of that foundation gets us to tackle real customer problems faster than building all of it ourselves would.
Aiven is also making a big bet on the AI era. Agents are the new medium of usage and Aiven is in a position to pioneer both the interface agents operate in and how agents are built. We couldn't be more excited to go after both and help Aiven become a generational AI infrastructure company.
Aiven and Flow AI go back a while. We co-organized every edition of Context is King, the meetup series we continue running together. We're two Helsinki-originated companies that care about the same hard problems and share the same vision. Joining a team we already know and trust made this decision a lot easier.
Thank you
A lot of people made the last six years possible: the early believers and investors who backed two founders with a strong vision and not much else, the teammates past and present who built this with us and the customers who trusted us with real problems. Thank you.
The best part is that we get to do this together. Karolus, Bernardo, Tiina and Minaam are all making the move with me, continuing as a new team inside Aiven with a much bigger canvas. We can't wait to get started.
You can read Aiven's side of the story on their blog.
