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.
We were founded by Kirsten Lum, a former head of science, economics, and data engineering at Amazon, and Wing Yew Lum, an ex-senior leader for multiple functions at Amazon.
More traditional background information:
- Founded in May of 2020 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.
- SOC-2 Type I and II compliant across all 5 Trust Service Criterias (Security, Availability, Processing Integrity, Confidentiality, and Privacy)
- Hold more than 50+ patent claims from the USPTO for machine learning and automated data preparation.
Less traditional background information:
- Believe being profitable is essential to completing purpose-driven missions, but financial success without missional fulfillment is a lower value prize.
- Seek people with five attributes in the extreme: intelligence, conscientiousness, generosity, purpose, and humility.
Less traditional beliefs:
- We are running out of time and should do as much good as fast as possible.
- 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).
- 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.
- The most meaningful technical solutions are gated by vision, IQ, conscientiousness, time, purpose, and humility.
Our companies and projects, including not-for-profit projects:
- Agents & Allies - A parent company founded by co-workers and friends focused on doing good (supporting human flourishing) enabled by doing well (financially).
- Just Scales – Multiple justice tech tools, including the most complete and fine‑grained incarceration data warehouse in the United States.
- Storytellers.ai – A machine learning and data analytics consultancy that's created and deployed performant models in over half a dozen verticals.
- Camelot - A health tech research company seeking to make medical research practically available at the scale of all credible research ever published.
- The Guardian – An AI technology that will provide a protective filtration layer for society.
- Schemantic.io - A 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.
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.
Anna Kepes. Product Manager and Partner.
Jonathan Brownell. Principal Engineer and Partner.