START: Silen Naihin, CTO & Co-Founder, Experiential Labs: "Open source AI gateway that turns your traffic into a model you own"

Every AI model. One key. Zero markup.

That’s the starting point. The bigger ambition: help companies turn their AI traffic into better models they own

Silen Naihin helped grow AutoGPT to 160,000 GitHub stars. Now, at Experiential Labs, he’s working to bring model access, evaluation and training into one unified experience.

The open-source gateway gives companies control over model access. From there, the team is building simulations around their traffic to understand different workloads and recommend models based on three things: cost, quality and speed.

The goal goes beyond choosing a model. It’s helping companies evaluate performance and train specialized models around their own work when they need them.

Silen expects agents to do most of the work. So the product has to serve both: humans who need to understand what’s happening and agents that need to use it.

Start with access. Build toward ownership.

"The open source AI gateway. Hosted providers, your own keys, and your own GPUs behind one endpoint, at the provider's price."

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🎙️Silen Naihin, CTO & Co-Founder, Experiential Labs on Fondo START

02:51 Going off the beaten path: TKS, Minerva & dropping out

03:37 Getting into YC & the research behind Experiential Labs