Our first work is Known.
01 / Company
Unknown pursues what software becomes next.
We believe every business should have a living understanding of itself: its customers, people, products, relationships, decisions, history, and current state. That understanding should belong to the company, not be spread across the applications, agents, and model providers it happens to use.
02 / First work
Known keeps the company model.
Known continuously maintains shared company context as the business evolves. Humans can ask questions grounded in history and provenance. Agents can work from the same understanding instead of reconstructing meaning from disconnected records for every task.
03 / Founders
Amsterdam, the Netherlands
Vancouver, Canada
Nikolai Onken
CEO · Amsterdam
Nikolai has been building developer tools since the early days of the JavaScript ecosystem. He led engineering at Cloud9, one of the first IDEs to run in the browser, used every day by hundreds of thousands of developers, through its acquisition by AWS. At AWS, he led the Amsterdam office as it grew to more than 200 people. There he saw firsthand how much of a large company’s information ends up spread across separate systems.
@nonkenBrock Whitten
CTO/CPO · Vancouver
Brock has spent his career building infrastructure other developers rely on. He co-created PhoneGap, later donated to Apache as Cordova, which made it possible to build mobile apps with web technology. He worked on the early Node.js cloud ecosystem at Joyent. He built Surge, which made deploying a website a single command and has handled more than 17 million deployments and 200 terabytes of published data.
@sintaxiNikolai and Brock have been building systems together for four years.
They built real-time and historical information systems for investment funds. The systems combined sources that changed constantly while keeping track of positions, transactions, decisions, provenance, and state. Nothing could be silently overwritten or lost. Every number had to remain explainable months later, including to an auditor.
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