Right, not right-sounding
A confident guess is not good enough for science. Every answer we serve traces back to a real source, with the provenance and citations to prove it, so researchers can check our work the way they check anyone's.
Building the foundation for people-centered, AI-accelerated research
Valency was founded on a simple conviction: the new era of AI-accelerated science is still, and will be, fundamentally a human-centered endeavor. We are a Berkeley-based team building the connective tissue between the world's research and the tools that reason over it.
What we believe
A few convictions shape everything we build. They are why Valency looks the way it does.
Science moves in hours. So do we.
A paper posted this morning should be findable this afternoon. We index new work as it appears, because a frontier you reach a quarter late is not the frontier.
The scientist stays in the loop
AI accelerates researchers. It does not replace them. Every product decision starts from that order, and we design for the person doing the science, not around them.
The team
A small team of scientists and builders who have spent their careers close to research, and to the infrastructure it runs on.
Josh Bloom
CEO and Co-founder. An academic and serial entrepreneur. He is an astronomy professor at UC Berkeley and has worked in the interface between time-domain and compact-object astrophysics. He received the Pierce Prize from the American Astronomical Society and is a former Hertz Foundation Fellow, Sloan Foundation Fellow, and a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society. He holds a PhD from Caltech, MPhil from Cambridge, and AB from Harvard. Before founding Valency, his previous AI-for-customer-support company, wise.io, was acquired by GE.
Karthik Ram
Head of Science. Karthik sets the direction for what the company builds across product, engineering, and marketing. His focus is on making AI actually useful for research: tools that meet scientists where they already work. He has founded and led national initiatives for open science and research software sustainability, and holds a PhD in Ecology and Evolution from UC Davis. He is a senior fellow at the Berkeley Institute for Data Science.
Ryan Anderson
COO and Co-founder. Ryan leads operations and enterprise strategy for Valency. He previously served as IBM's Architect in Residence, San Francisco, and as CTO for the IBM-Palo Alto Networks partnership. He holds an MBA from Cambridge's Judge Business School and is active in the Bay Area startup community.
How we work
Building infrastructure for science means holding ourselves to the standards of the people who use it.
Build with researchers, not just for them
We design alongside working scientists at universities and national labs, and ship against real workflows instead of imagined ones. Their feedback sets our roadmap.
Ship grounded
We would rather say "we don't know yet" than emit something plausible and wrong. Provenance and correctness come before polish, in the product and in how we talk about it.
Small team, wide ownership
We keep the team small and the ownership broad. Everyone talks to users, everyone touches the product, and good ideas win regardless of who has them.
Get in touch
Press and media: media@valency.io. Labs, institutions, and partnerships: labs@valency.io. Want to build this with us? See our open roles.