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Forward-deployed AI Agents
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.
Hessian provides forward-deployed AI agents to automate operations across a business. They embed engineers to build and run AI-driven workflows that integrate with a company’s existing tooling and providers.
Hessian ships engineers who co-create and operate AI agents end-to-end on their platform. The product offers workflows, agents, workers, and integrations (Docker, Kubernetes, OpenAI, GitHub, Slack, AWS, Postgres, Vault, etc.), with on-site embedding, building agents on Hessian, and operating them in production. It emphasizes embedding with the customer, building agents on their platform, and running them in production to automate knowledge-work tasks such as sales, finance, ops, data, and design workflows, using pre-baked tools, policies, and observability.
Who it’s for: Businesses seeking to automate knowledge-work operations by deploying AI-driven agents, with a need to embed engineers on-site and integrate with existing tooling and providers.
Hiring/traction mentioned (engineering team, founders, YC backing) and customer testimonials; platform emphasizes production deployment and long-term partnership.
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, 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, 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 £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.
We embed engineers into companies and ship AI agents that automate the real work.
Hessian embeds engineers into companies to identify automation opportunities and builds custom AI agents that handle workflows including sales proposals, financial reconciliation, and operations tasks. The company operates and scales the agents on its platform.
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Automated forward-deployed engineers (AI FDEs)
Agent harnesses for asset managers
