DeepReach Inc.

Origins

Chris and I are from the same hometown and have known each other for ten years, long before either of us thought about robots. In that time I built two companies around the same problem: how do you organize people you'll never meet, in places you'll never visit, to do consistent work? The first was HireIO, a cross-border staffing platform out of Silicon Valley. The second was Talex, an expert network for LLM data annotation — around 70,000 people across ten countries. Chris went the other direction: a CS PhD at USC in computer vision, ML infrastructure at Meta, then founding ML engineer at Aven. Running an annotation network for language models, I kept hitting the same wall from the supply side. Text was running out, and the next generation of models wasn't going to learn from the internet. It was going to learn from the physical world — and nobody had captured it. What a warehouse picker, a line cook or a phone repair technician knows is real expertise, and none of it was ever written down. You can't buy that data, because it doesn't exist yet. Chris was hitting the same wall from the model side, watching what was missing from training sets. The default answer at the time was to put a lab in one city and record thousands of hours in the same room. That produces volume, not diversity, and robot policies don't generalize from volume. What the models needed was the opposite shape: a few hours each from thousands of different real workplaces, all over the world. Which meant the bottleneck wasn't an AI problem. It was a distributed human network problem — reaching thousands of ordinary businesses across dozens of countries, and giving the people already working in them a reason to capture what they do. That was the problem I'd spent two companies learning to solve. We started DeepReach in 2025. Chris owns perception and the data engine; I own the network, hardware operations and the commercial side. Ten years of knowing each other means we skipped most of the negotiation that takes co-founders their first year.