Guide Labs is a San Francisco AI research company building interpretable foundation models - large language and diffusion models that can reliably explain how they reach an answer, trace outputs back to their training data, and be steered without retraining. Founded in 2023 by machine-learning researcher Julius Adebayo and colleagues from the academic interpretability world, the company argues that the black-box status quo is a solvable engineering problem, not an unavoidable cost of scale. Its flagship open-source release, Steerling-8B, is pitched as the first large-scale inherently interpretable language model, and its Clarity platform packages interpretability tools for teams in regulated, high-stakes fields like lending, medicine, and drug discovery.
Openlayer is an AI governance and observability platform that helps enterprise teams test, monitor, and trust their machine learning and LLM systems across the full lifecycle - from prototype to production. Founded by ex-Apple, Amazon and Harvard alumni and backed by Y Combinator and Race Capital, the company raised a $14.5M Series A in May 2025.