frontier-models
(4)
Maingen
Maingen is a Y Combinator (S26) startup building reinforcement learning environments for industrial operations - the roughly $5 trillion slice of the US economy that runs factories, power plants, and solar farms. Its first product, SolarBench, tests whether frontier AI agents can act as the on-call engineer for a portfolio of solar farms, handling alerts, telemetry, work orders, and priced field actions. The company sells the environments and datasets that let AI labs train and evaluate models on messy, long-horizon physical-world work.
Deccan AI
Deccan AI is a Mountain View-based GenAI data company that runs the post-training and production layer for frontier labs and enterprises. It builds super-accurate SFT and RLHF datasets, reinforcement learning environments and agentic evaluation pipelines using an elite expert network and a purpose-built quality platform.
MatX
MatX is a Mountain View semiconductor company building chips designed exclusively for large language models. Founded in 2022 by ex-Google TPU engineers Reiner Pope and Mike Gunter, it aims to deliver an order-of-magnitude more performance-per-dollar for frontier model training and inference than current GPUs.
Mercor
Mercor is an AI-powered talent marketplace that recruits domain experts - doctors, lawyers, engineers, scientists - to train and evaluate frontier AI models for labs like OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Meta, and Amazon. Founded in 2023 by three Thiel Fellows, it has grown from a hiring tool into the human data backbone of the AI economy.