Agents & Allies is a closely held, investor-backed incubator focused on creating barrier-lowering technologies that support human flourishing. We tend to do this by inventing capabilities that can solve foundational challenges in a domain of expertise or vertical of focus.
Traditional background information:
- Founded and led by ex‑big‑tech engineering, product, and growth leaders.
- Ranked by Inc. Magazine as one of the fastest‑growing private companies in America.
- Hold more than 50+ patent claims for machine learning and automated data preparation.
Less traditional background information:
- Most founders have worked together for over a decade.
- Believe being profitable is essential to completing purpose-led missions, but financial success without missional fulfillment is a lesser prize.
- Seek people with five attributes in the extreme: intelligence, conscientiousness, generosity, purpose, and humility.
Less traditional beliefs:
- We are always running out of time.
- The most meaningful technical solutions are gated by six guards -> vision, IQ, conscientiousness, time, purpose, and humility. The strength of guards rises in proportion to solution value.
- We focus on problems at the intersection of impact and "no one else is willing and/or able to" – no one else is willing to (too boring, too dirty, too slow) and/or able to (too hard to see, too hard to do).
- Most of our solutions are viewed as either (a) impossible to do or (b) obvious in retrospect.
- We believe highly intelligent people disproportionately need to “be right,” and it is one of the first things we screen for—if any individual needs to be right, it functions as a de facto rate‑limiter on the organization, so we avoid long‑term or deeply integrated partnerships.
Our companies and projects:
- Agents & Allies - A parent company founded by co-workers and friends focused on doing good (supporting human flourishing) enabled by doing well (financially).
- SmartJoin (and EntityExplorer) - A separate company with a data catalog toolset capable of fully autonomously and deterministically finding, validating, and mapping every join, as well as every entity and all related data, in a data warehouse. We believe we are the only company on earth who can make and deliver on this claim.
- Camelot - A health tech research company seeking to make medical research practically available at the scale of all research ever published.
- Unjust Imprisonment – Multiple justice tech tools, including the most complete and fine‑grained incarceration data warehouse in the United States, then layering analytical tools to make outlier analysis possible on hundreds of dimensions. Will include LLM tools which support the speed and effectiveness of justice advocates during the appeals process.
- The Guardian – A pocketable AI technology that will provide a protective filtration layer for society.
Founding Team
Wing Yew Lum. Founder, Chairman of the Board of Directors.
Kirsten Lum. Founder, Partner, Board Director.
Victor Cheng. Founder, Partner, Board Director.
Sheffield Leithart. Founder and Partner, VP of Engineering.
Garrett Fiddler. Founder and Partner, Distinguished Engineer.
Chris Gutierrez. Founder and Partner.
Erin Torgerson. Founder and Partner.
Julia Hannula. Founder and Partner.
Amy Rogers. Founder and Partner.
Doug Treff. Founder and Partner.
Phil Gallo. Founder and Partner.