Aemon
The AI Research Engineer
Winter 2026ActiveB2BArtificial IntelligenceB2BSan Francisco, CA, USA
Company
https://aemon.aiAemon is the first autonomous research engineer that delivers state-of-the-art solutions to your engineering problems. It generates, tests, and evolves thousands of approaches at machine speed to discover optimal solutions beyond what human experts can find.
Aemon already set a new world record on an NP-hard math optimization problem with <$10 of compute, beating the previous record set by Google DeepMind in 2025.
Ray and Richard (twin brothers) dropped out of UWaterloo and UIUC to build Aemon. They published at top AI conferences like ICLR and EMNLP before turning 20.
Verdict
High Signal
Market Opportunity
Autonomous AI research engineering targeting hard optimization problems is a massive B2B market — applicable to logistics, drug discovery, chip design, financial modeling, and any domain with NP-hard computational problems. Enterprise customers in these verticals pay seven figures annually for even marginal solution improvements. ICP is less precisely defined publicly but the technical differentiation maps clearly to high-value industrial optimization use cases.
Medium Signal
Founder Signal
Ray has ICLR 2025 and EMNLP 2024 publications, research at NCSA/UIUC and Lapis Labs, and was FIR at Afore Capital — strong technical depth for his age (sub-20 publications). Richard has software internships at RBC and MIT-PITT-RW autonomous vehicle team, Vex Robotics World Champion, and Euclid math contest top 35 in Ontario — solid but lighter on deep AI research. Both are young dropouts (~20 years old) with limited industry experience, though their research output is genuinely impressive early signal.
Medium Signal
Competition
No competitor data was found in the research, but the space includes Google DeepMind (AlphaCode/optimization research), FunSearch, and AI coding agents like Cognition/Devin and SWE-agent. The specific angle of automated algorithm discovery and optimization at machine speed is more differentiated than generic AI coding assistants, and the benchmark result against DeepMind is a meaningful moat signal — but well-funded incumbents dominate adjacent research.
High Signal
Product
Concrete case study with quantified results: legal retrieval Recall@10 improved from 0.540 to 0.912. Detailed 5-step workflow visible. World record claim on NP-hard math optimization beating Google DeepMind with <$10 compute. Book a Demo CTAs. No pricing page, no named customer logos, no API docs.
OverallB Tier
Technically exceptional young founders who have produced a concrete case study: legal retrieval Recall@10 improved from 0.540 to 0.912, plus a world record claim on NP-hard optimization beating Google DeepMind with under $10 compute. Detailed 5-step workflow visible. The market for AI-powered optimization is enormous across logistics, scheduling, and routing. Main risk is converting academic results into commercial products and competing with well-funded optimization platforms. The quantified results are a strong credibility signal.
Active Founders
Aemon
TierB Tier
BatchWinter 2026
Team Size3
StatusActive
LocationSan Francisco, CA, USA
Last Updated2 days ago