Our Story

The Beginning

Cetacean Labs was born from the collaboration of Chris McGrath and Anthony Monroy, later joined by Tom Schmidt. The Lab grew out of Esteemed and its Digital division, which had been building AI solutions for HR tech and HCM systems.

Chris decided it would be best to partition those efforts off into an R&D Lab to access grant funding and support academic researchers with our technology, along with the vast innovations occurring in open source engineering.

A Natural Fit

Anthony had already been working on an AI Safety and Governance organization, so Cetacean Labs, being both an R&D lab and accelerator, was a natural fit.

The accelerator was born from the work Esteemed had done in bringing together 35,000 IT professionals seeking opportunities and networking. The company had already set up much of the logistical infrastructure, legal formation, and other services an accelerator needs, along with a large base of fractional advisors and executives.

This was already being consumed by Private Equity firms, so this seemed like a way to create more opportunities for the community and spark innovation.

Oceanic: Our First Platform

After coming together and imagining a platform that would breed rapid innovation and test some of the technologies in the areas of memory, orchestration, and intelligence, Oceanic, the AI Platform builder, seemed like a wise basis for our first accelerator project.