What an abysmal series of top comments. These guys created a phenomenal product using novel technology, which will only continue to improve. Great work to the Zed team.
Sure. Would contextualize by saying that infrastructure is a financial product: climate/industrial projects are sited in the physical world and have a hard upfront cost to produce a long term stream of cash flows, which, from a finance perspective, makes it look a lot like debt (e.g. I pay par value in order to achieve [x] cash flows with [y] risk).
When you drive past a solar project on the side of the road, you see the solar technology producing energy. But in order for a bank to fund $100M to construct the project, it has to be "developed" as if it were a long-term financial product across 15 or so major agreements (power offtake, lease agreement, property tax negotiations, etc). The fragmentation of tools and context among all the various counterparties involved to pull this sort of thing together into a creditworthy package for funding is enormously inefficient and as a result, processes which should be parallelize-able can't be parallelized, creating large amounts of risk into the project development process.
While all kinds of asset class-specific tools exist for solar or real estate or whatever, most of them are extremely limited in function because almost of those things abstract down into a narrative that you're communicating to a given party at any given time (including your own investment committee), and a vast swath of factual information represented by deterministic financial calculations and hundreds if not thousands of pages of legal documentation.
We build technology to centralize/coordinate/version control these workflows in order to unlock an order of magnitude more efficiency across that entire process in its totality. But instead of selling software, we sell those development + financing outcomes (which is where _all_ of the value is in this space), because we're actually able to scale that work far more effectively than anyone else right now.
So, we've been down this rabbithole at Phosphor (phosphor.co) and have explored/made a couple of really big technology bets on it.
The most unique/useful applications of it in production are based on combining dependent types with database/graph queries as a means. This enables you to take something like RDF which is neat in a lot of ways but has a lot of limitations, add typing and logic to the queries, in order to generally reimagine how you think about querying databases.
For those interested in exploring this space from a "I'd like to build something real with this", I'd strongly recommend checking out TypeDB (typedb.com). It's been in development for about a decade, is faster than MongoDB for vast swaths of things, and is one of the most ergonomic frameworks we've found to designing complex data applications (Phosphor's core is similar in many ways to Palantir's ontology concept). We went into it assuming that we were exploring a brand new technology, and have found it to work pretty comprehensively for all kinds of production settings.
Phosphor | NYC/Remote | Full Time | Founding Engineer | $150-225k + Equity
Phosphor builds recursively self-improving systems (via malleable software and natural language interfaces) to enable the efficient development and financing of the physical world (infrastructure, energy, real estate).
Our product is built around a powerful object model which combines document editors with proprietary programming languages for financial modeling, computable contracts, etc, in order to build one of the more unique RLHF feedback loops that we've seen to date.
A primary technical bet is that if we can productize version control properly, we can capture annotated "diffs" of user information with user-validated annotations. By doing so, we create path-dependence, which enables us to specify system-level goals for agents to solve for.
Our product is similar a combination of Linear and Wolfram, with components and objects that enable advanced financial modeling, legal/regulatory analysis, and geospatial analysis of infrastructure development opportunities.
We're venture-backed by one of the best deeptech funds in the market and are hiring for roles spanning product engineers, CRDT wizards, and compiler/calculation engine leads.
Job listings can be found at the bottom of phosphor.co.
Phosphor | NYC | Full Time | Founding Engineer (HCI focus) | $175-225k + Equity
Phosphor enables the development of the built world (e.g. from real estate to energy projects) to be managed agentically by building programming languages and observability primitives (like version control) on top of a hypergraph.
Our primary technical bet is that if you capture annotated "diffs" of user information with the appropriate annotation, you can create path-dependence to train AI models in an AlphaGo like context. By doing so, we achieve agentic experiences for markets that have never even had an opportunity to imagine what life would be like with basic observability.
Our product is similar a combination of Linear and Wolfram, with components and objects that enable advanced financial modeling, legal/regulatory analysis, and geospatial analysis of infrastructure development opportunities.
We're in stealth, but recently venture-backed by one of the best deeptech funds in the market. We're hiring for a few roles at the senior/staff levels:
1. HCI Engineer - You're a prosemirror wizard who probably follows Ink & Switch or the UCSB HCI lab on Twitter; front-end/rich-text/typescript focused; lots of architectural/sync engine work
2. Systems/Compiler Engineer - We design and build dev tools for languages we create that compile into various graph representations. These range from financial modeling calcs (which need to go very fast to support a seamless UX), to computable representations of legal agreements. Extra points if you've worked with hypergraphs. This in Rust but we're exploring a few other languages.
Email resume/linkedin/twitter to [email protected] if you might fit somewhere in here, or if you've taken a credible attempt at building end-user programming tools.