We forward deploy with AI agents to automate business operations
Hessian is the platform for automating business operations with AI agents. We forward deploy on-site to map the work, and build the agents on our platform to run it end-to-end. Unlike off-the-shelf tools that don't know your business, you get a partner that owns the software and operates it every day. Why now? Coding agents have matured to the point where, combined with our engineering judgment we've built across a decade of shipping production systems, we can scale forward-deployed engagements with minimal headcount. Furthermore, our FDE agents and tooling will accelerate how quickly we automate workflows on our platform. We're already saving our customers hundreds of hours a month. Trillions of dollars a year are spent on knowledge work, and we're building the standard for how every company deploys, operates, and governs the AI agents that do it.
Active Founders
Co-Founder & CEO
Bao, co-founder and CEO of Hessian – leads GTM, fundraising, customer relationships, and ML strategy. He co-founded Zettafleet, leading engineers to build a decentralized LLM training platform on hundreds of GPUs, and was a SWE at Bloomberg building ML pipelines to rate physical assets and managed a Bloomberg-Goldman Sachs Index. MPhil (scholarship) from the University of Cambridge and BSc from Durham University in CS, with publications in ML systems, including research with Google DeepMind.
Bao, co-founder and CEO of Hessian – leads GTM, fundraising, customer relationships, and ML strategy. He co-founded Zettafleet, leading engineers to build a decentralized LLM training platform on hundreds of GPUs, and was a SWE at Bloomberg building ML pipelines to rate physical assets and managed a Bloomberg-Goldman Sachs Index. MPhil (scholarship) from the University of Cambridge and BSc from Durham University in CS, with publications in ML systems, including research with Google DeepMind.
Co-Founder
James, co-founder and COO of Hessian – leads forward-deployed engagements: customer relationship, system design, shipping AI pipelines to production. Previously fiv years at Bloomberg building a data platform processing billions of observations for financial firms, including entity-disambiguation AI pipelines; a year at DRW building data infrastructure and pipelines for commodities trading desks. CS at Durham University (top of year); awarded three scholarships from the University of Cambridge.
James, co-founder and COO of Hessian – leads forward-deployed engagements: customer relationship, system design, shipping AI pipelines to production. Previously fiv years at Bloomberg building a data platform processing billions of observations for financial firms, including entity-disambiguation AI pipelines; a year at DRW building data infrastructure and pipelines for commodities trading desks. CS at Durham University (top of year); awarded three scholarships from the University of Cambridge.
Founder
Tom, co-founder and CTO of Hessian – leads technical direction and engineering of the platform which Hessian runs on. Previously at GoCardless, he was part of a team which migrated the core payments database to a more scalable provider live with zero downtime, on a system processing over £1B on peak days. Prior, spent 2 years at CMC Markets building a 0-to-1 retail trading app for US investors. BSc in CS from Durham University, where his team won the IBM prize for shipping a production CMS.
Tom, co-founder and CTO of Hessian – leads technical direction and engineering of the platform which Hessian runs on. Previously at GoCardless, he was part of a team which migrated the core payments database to a more scalable provider live with zero downtime, on a system processing over £1B on peak days. Prior, spent 2 years at CMC Markets building a 0-to-1 retail trading app for US investors. BSc in CS from Durham University, where his team won the IBM prize for shipping a production CMS.
Company Launches
Hessian: Automating business operations with forward-deployed AI agents
See original launch postHey YC, We're Bao, James, and Tom - co-founders of Hessian!
TL;DR
- Every company is racing to adopt AI, but most don't know where to start at scale.
- We forward-deploy engineers into your team, map the work, then build and operate AI agents on our platform.
We are already saving our customers hundreds of hours a month and allowing them to put the work where it matters.
The Problem: Companies cannot adopt AI effectively
Every company is racing to adopt AI. Most use disparate SaaS tools that are built for everyone, optimised for no one and need to be actively prompted.
Two reasons most companies get stuck:
- Lack of knowledge and capacity to adopt AI effectively. Most companies can't identify which workflows should be automated, let alone build a production-grade system to do it. The engineers who can do this work are scarce and concentrated in a handful of frontier firms.
- Off-the-shelf tools don't know your business and lack integration with your existing systems. They do not meet customers where they are.
Our Solution: Forward-deploy with AI agents
We forward deploy on-site to map the work, and build the agents on our platform to run it end-to-end.
1. Map the work. Our engineers deeply embed into your organization to find where automation can be most effective – freeing your team to do more meaningful work.
2. Build the agents. Custom AI agents on the Hessian platform that take over that work end-to-end. For example:
- 📊 Sales agents that draft proposals between calls, pulling CRM, pricing decks, and customer context automatically.
- 💰 Financial agents that reconcile invoices and prepares month-end close overnight.
- ⚙️ Ops agents that keep internal systems in sync without anyone asking.
- 📈 Data agents deliver critical insights to frontline teams, allowing them to query internal databases and filesystems through chat.
3. Operate them in production. We deploy, operate, and scale the agents on our platform.
The Hessian Platform.
The Team
- Bao – Previously co-founded Zettafleet, where he led the team behind a decentralized LLM training platform across hundreds of GPUs; previously published ML research with Google DeepMind; CS from Cambridge and Durham.
- James – Spent five years at Bloomberg building and forward-deploying a data platform processing billions of time series observations a day. CS from Durham, awarded three Cambridge scholarships.
- Tom – Migrated GoCardless core payments database live, with zero downtime, on a system processing over £1B on peak days; previously built CMC Markets's 0-to-1 retail trading app for US investors; CS from Durham.
Book a forward deployed engagement at: https://calendar.app.google/JSYFwaCXXTiN6Mka8
