# AI should be something people trust.

Openlayer exists to help organizations build and deploy AI that people can confidently rely on.

## The future deserves better AI.

Today, too much of the conversation around AI is shaped by what could go wrong.

Hallucinations. Loss of control. Regulation. Replacing people.

Those concerns are real, but they shouldn't define the future.

We believe AI has the potential to improve healthcare, accelerate scientific discovery, transform education, make transportation safer, and unlock entirely new ways of working.

At Openlayer, we're working toward a future where trust unlocks AI's greatest potential. A future where organizations can build with confidence because their systems are transparent, accountable, and continuously improving.

Trust isn't something you claim.

It's something you earn, every day.

## By the numbers

| Milestone | Detail |
| --- | --- |
| Founded | Founded by ex-Apple Siri and Vision Pro ML engineers |
| YC + Race | Backed by Y Combinator and Race Capital |
| SOC 2 Type II | Plus GDPR compliance |

## Our story

Openlayer started at Apple.

Our founders built models for Siri and Vision Pro across multiple teams, and kept rebuilding the same infrastructure to evaluate how those models performed. Because Apple is so privacy-oriented, there was no shared system for evaluation, observability, or governance, so every team solved the same problem from scratch.

Some of those models powered core Siri, like the natural language systems already shipping to hundreds of millions of people. Others were for projects not yet released, like Vision Pro. From both vantage points we saw the same question: how do you know a model will work well for all kinds of people and situations? At Apple we could test that Siri worked when someone called 911, but never anticipate every real-world edge case, such as a baby crying, road noise, or a HomePod answering from another room.

We founded the company to **catch those edge cases** before shipping, instead of waiting for users to find the gaps. We named it Openlayer to capture the idea of opening up the layers of an AI system: the layer of your workflow built to understand your AI, open and transparent by design. We started as Unbox, for unboxing the black box of a model, and changed the name to avoid conflicts.

Over time we grew from pre-deployment testing into production monitoring, so engineers could test thoroughly before shipping, find gaps quickly in production, fix them, and redeploy with far faster iteration velocity. In the last couple of years, as generative and agentic **AI became easier to build and more powerful**, we added a third focus: governance and automated compliance.

## The good people

| Name | Role |
| --- | --- |
| Jaime Bañuelos | Head of Strategic Alliances |
| Gabriel Bayomi | Co-founder and CEO |
| J.D. Bonnar | VP of Sales |
| Kim Capili | Executive Assistant |
| Matt Cubillos | Account Executive |
| Joao Dutra | Head of Operations |
| Juliana Van Daele | Head of Growth |
| Vinicius Mello | Head of Solutions, LATAM |
| Vikas Nair | Co-founder and CPO |
| Sandy Nguyen | Senior Product Designer |
| Gustavo Cid Ornelas | Founding Engineer |
| Matheus Portela | Senior Backend Engineer |
| Michaela Haen | SDR |
| Rishab Ramanathan | Co-founder and CTO |
| Guilherme Rodz | Design Engineer |
| Luciano Rolim | Head of Sales, LATAM |
| John Schmitt | Lead SDR |
| Siddhant Shah | Senior Backend Engineer |
| Taylor Whipp | Pre-Sales Engineer |
| Vitali Zahharov | Product Designer |

We are hiring. See [open roles](/careers).

## Why we come to work

> Openlayer fits directly into our pipeline. We block an unsafe deployment in CI the same way we block a failing unit test, except now we are testing AI quality and safety, not just code correctness.
>
> Michaela Haen

## Backed by builders.

We're fortunate to be backed by venture firms and operators who have helped build companies like Vercel, Instacart, Mercury, Instagram, Thumbtack, and others. Their support lets us stay focused on the long-term challenge: helping the world build AI people can trust.

- Guillermo Rauch, Vercel
- Max Mullen, Instacart
- Mike Krieger, Instagram
- Immad Akhund, Mercury
- Jonathan Swanson, Thumbtack
- Astasia Myers, Felicis
- Anjney Midha, a16z
- John Kim, Sendbird

## Good people, making trustworthy AI.