frontier-ai
(6)
micro1 Bet the AI Boom Would Run Out of Human Judgment
The young company began with an AI interviewer. It is now selling the scarce ingredient frontier models, workplace agents and robots all need: structured evidence of how capable people think and work.
Tim Lupo
Tim Lupo is the co-founder and CEO of Deeptune, a New York startup that builds high-fidelity reinforcement learning environments - which he calls 'training gyms' or 'flight simulators' - where AI agents learn to do real digital work across enterprise software like Salesforce and Slack. In early 2026 the company raised a $43M Series A led by Andreessen Horowitz. Deeptune started life as an AI video-dubbing tool that landed Lupo and co-founder Lukas Schmit on the Forbes 30 Under 30 list, then pivoted to become RL infrastructure for frontier AI labs. A former founding engineer at Hebbia and a full-merit USC scholar, Lupo pitches the roughly 20-person, in-person team as one of the only early-stage places in New York to work on AGI.
RadixArk
RadixArk is an AI infrastructure company spun out of the team behind SGLang, the open-source inference engine that serves trillions of tokens a day for the likes of Google, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle and xAI. Founded by Ying Sheng and Banghua Zhu, RadixArk keeps SGLang and its reinforcement-learning framework Miles free and open while selling managed hosting and tooling on top, aiming to make building, training and running frontier models at least 10x cheaper and 10x more accessible. It launched publicly in May 2026 with a $100M seed round led by Accel and Spark Capital at a $400M valuation.
Hirsh Jain
Hirsh Jain is the co-founder and CEO of Percepta, a General Catalyst Transformation Company that embeds AI engineers, researchers, and product managers directly inside large enterprises to move them past pilots and into AI-native operations. He spent seven years at Palantir Technologies as a senior vice president leading its healthcare and civilian-government business, and previously worked at Google, Jane Street, and the U.S. Department of Defense. A Harvard computer-science and mathematics graduate and published machine-learning author, he launched Percepta in 2025 with General Catalyst CEO Hemant Taneja and a founding team drawn from Palantir, MIT, Meta FAIR, Google, and Citadel. Shortly after launch, Palantir sued him and other former employees, putting the New York startup at the center of one of the year's most-watched AI talent fights.
Reflection AI
Reflection AI is a New York-based artificial intelligence lab founded in 2024 by former Google DeepMind researchers Misha Laskin and Ioannis Antonoglou. It is building autonomous coding agents and open frontier language models, with the stated ambition of reaching superintelligence by first solving software engineering. Its flagship product, Asimov, is a code research and comprehension agent for large codebases. After raising $2 billion at an $8 billion valuation in October 2025, the company has positioned itself as an open, Western alternative to closed labs like OpenAI and Anthropic and to Chinese open-weight models like DeepSeek.
Labelbox
Labelbox is a San Francisco-based AI data factory that helps frontier AI labs and enterprises generate, label, and evaluate the high-quality training data their models need. Its platform combines annotation tools, model-assisted automation, and a global expert network (Alignerr) to power post-training, RLHF, and multimodal reasoning workloads.