the-hog
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Hudson Liao Tried to Automate Himself. The Result Was a Company.
Before Hudson Liao built an AI company around the craft of growth, he spent nearly 15 years learning that craft in places as varied as a firehouse, a finance office, biotech labs and scrappy startups. The Hog is his attempt to bottle the judgment without draining the humanity.
The Hog
The Hog is a San Francisco startup from Y Combinator's Fall 2025 batch that packages people data, company data, web search, news, social signals, sentiment, and scraping behind a single pay-per-call API for AI agents and go-to-market teams. It routes each request through multiple data providers using waterfall logic, positioning itself as one endpoint that replaces a stack of tools like Clay, Apollo, Exa, and Tavily. Founded by growth operator Hudson Liao and AI engineer Paulo Nascimento, it aims to compress market research and outreach from hours into minutes.