What we do
Unknown is an independent computer company. Software is changing operator, from humans to agents, and we build what has to exist for that change to hold. That pursuit is not limited to one product or one domain.
Our first work is Known, the information layer beneath the AI-native company. Known gives every company a living understanding of itself: its customers, people, products, relationships, decisions, history, and current state. That understanding belongs to the company rather than being fragmented across the applications and models it happens to use.
Why this happens now, and what would make us wrong, is set out in the Unknown Thesis.
How we work
Nothing is silently overwritten
History is kept. What was true, and why a decision was made, has to remain explainable months later, including to an auditor. We built that way for investment funds, and we build Known that way.
The company owns its understanding
Meaning, relationships, and history belong to the company, not to the applications, models, or agents it happens to use. That includes ours. The model and its meaning exist in a documented, exportable form, never only inside our product.
Specific enough to believe
Large claims travel with concrete work, names, dates, and evidence. Ambition without specifics is noise.
Say what would make us wrong
The thesis names the assumptions it depends on. When one of them fails, we update the thesis rather than the story.
Build beneath transitions
Software is changing operator, from humans to agents. We build the layer that has to exist for that change to hold, not the interface of the moment.
Nikolai Onken
CEO · Amsterdam
Led AWS Amsterdam
He grew the office to more than 200 people as AWS expanded its engineering presence in Europe.
Led engineering at Cloud9
Cloud9 was one of the first IDEs to run entirely in the browser, used by hundreds of thousands of developers every day. AWS acquired the company.
Co-founded uxebu
uxebu was one of the first JavaScript consultancies in Europe, working with companies including Vodafone, Motorola, BlackBerry, and Google.
Brock Whitten
CTO/CPO · Vancouver
Built Surge
Surge reduced website deployment to a single command. It has handled about 18 million deployments and 234 terabytes of published data for 472,000 users across 10 regions worldwide.
Led the Joyent cloud API
In 2010, the API provisioned SmartMachines in real time, on demand, across Joyent's public cloud. Joyent, the company behind Node.js, was among the first to run it in production for enterprise cloud systems.
Co-created PhoneGap
PhoneGap brought device functionality to the web in 2008. It was the first production implementation of open web standards for device access, giving JavaScript geolocation and accelerometer data on iOS before browsers supported them natively. Adobe acquired Nitobi, the company behind PhoneGap, and the open-source project was donated to the Apache Software Foundation, where it became Apache Cordova.
Together
Nikolai and Brock have built systems together since 2022.
For investment funds, they built real-time and historical systems where every position, transaction, and decision had to stay correct, traceable, and explainable to an auditor.
Now they are building Unknown.
Join
Unknown is a small team working from Amsterdam and Vancouver. We build infrastructure that other systems, and other companies, will depend on, so we care about correctness, provenance, and durable design more than the speed of a demo.
We look for people who have built systems where information could not be lost or quietly changed, who write clearly, and who read the thesis and want to argue with it.
We do not list open roles. If this sounds like work you have already been doing, write to hello@unknown.cc and tell us what you have built.
Company
- Entity
- Unknown Inc.
- Registered
- Cheyenne, Wyoming, United States
- Working from
- Amsterdam, the Netherlands and Vancouver, Canada
- hello@unknown.cc
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