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Hessian

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We forward deploy with AI agents to automate business operations

Spring 2026Founded 20263 peopleSan Francisco, CA, USA
AI insightcan contain mistakes
Forward-Deployed Agent OperationsServicesMid-market to enterprise manufacturing, logistics, operationsMedium competition
Moat
On-site ops knowledge; existing customer relationships; ability to scale engagements with coding agents.
Key risk
Unit economics require high agent:human ratio; scale limits FDE model; client lock-in not guaranteed.
Why now
Agent maturity enabling cheaper autonomous operations; labor cost inflation making traditional ops expensive.
Competitors
Accenture, Deloitte, IBM, RPA vendors

About

Hessian is the platform for automating business operations with AI agents. We forward deploy on-site to map the work, and build the agents on our platform to run it end-to-end. Unlike off-the-shelf tools that don't know your business, you get a partner that owns the software and operates it every day. Why now? Coding agents have matured to the point where, combined with our engineering judgment we've built across a decade of shipping production systems, we can scale forward-deployed engagements with minimal headcount. Furthermore, our FDE agents and tooling will accelerate how quickly we automate workflows on our platform. We're already saving our customers hundreds of hours a month. Trillions of dollars a year are spent on knowledge work, and we're building the standard for how every company deploys, operates, and governs the AI agents that do it.

Founders Β· 3

Bao Nguyen
Bao NguyenCo-Founder & CEO
GoogleGoldman SachsCambridgeπŸŽ“ Durham UniversityπŸŽ“ University of Cambridge

Bao, co-founder and CEO of Hessian – leads GTM, fundraising, customer relationships, and ML strategy. He co-founded Zettafleet, leading engineers to build a decentralized LLM training platform on hundreds of GPUs, and was a SWE at Bloomberg building ML pipelines to rate physical assets and managed a Bloomberg-Goldman Sachs Index. MPhil (scholarship) from the University of Cambridge and BSc from Durham University in CS, with publications in ML systems, including research with Google DeepMind.

James Smith
James SmithCo-Founder
CambridgeπŸŽ“ Durham UniversityπŸŽ“ University of Cambridge

James, co-founder and COO of Hessian – leads forward-deployed engagements: customer relationship, system design, shipping AI pipelines to production. Previously five years at Bloomberg building a data platform processing billions of observations for financial firms, including entity-disambiguation AI pipelines, then DRW building data infrastructure and pipelines for commodities trading desks. CS at Durham University (top of year); awarded three scholarships from the University of Cambridge.

Tom Watson
Tom WatsonFounder
IBMπŸŽ“ Durham University

Tom, co-founder and CTO of Hessian – leads technical direction and engineering of the platform which Hessian runs on. Previously at GoCardless, he was part of a team which migrated the core payments database to a more scalable provider live with zero downtime, on a system processing over Β£1B on peak days. Prior, spent 2 years at CMC Markets building a 0-to-1 retail trading app for US investors. BSc in CS from Durham University, where his team won the IBM prize for shipping a production CMS.

Launch

Launched on Y Combinator Β· May 2026
View launch post β†—

We embed engineers into companies and ship AI agents that automate the real work.

Hessian forwards engineers to embed in a customer’s team, map workflows, build custom AI agents on the Hessian platform, and operate them in production to automate end-to-end work (e.g., sales, finance, operations, data insights) at scale for enterprises.

B2BDeveloper ToolsMachine LearningWorkflow AutomationAI

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