Overview
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.
Founders & team
Bao Nguyen
Founder/CEOBao, 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 Smith
Founder/COOJames, 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 Watson
Founder/CTOTom, 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.
Founded 2026 · Source ↗
Sources & observations
Y Combinator
Profile depthenriched profile
Website observationwebsite reachable
Last website check2026-11-11
Location · source statedLondon, England, United Kingdom
Pricing evidenceA pricing page was detected
Maturity: Not assessed · 4 of 6 areas documented
Source-based assessment · automated evidence rules
The retained text does not establish product availability or customer use.
Maturity is an evidence-based assessment, not a success rating. It may understate the current stage where evidence is limited. Coverage records documented areas, not a complete or independently audited company history.
Stage definitionsindependent websitesource corroborationreachable websitedescriptive evidenceclassified market and modelsourced peoplesourced founding yearpricing page observed
