About
Two accounts of the founding were submitted. They agreed on what happened and on nothing else. What follows is the account on record.
Gaslight AI was founded in Chicago1 in 20252 by Paul Anton, Bella Alquist and Elizabeth Manningham3.
The three were working late on a migration that had stalled. An apply had halted mid-graph at two in the morning, waiting for a human to decide whether a subnet in a neighboring availability zone was an acceptable substitute for the one named in the configuration. It was. Everyone awake knew it was. The tool would not proceed until someone said so, and the someone it was waiting for was asleep.
Paul4 asked why a tool that plainly already knew the answer was unwilling to say it. That question is this company.
Four discrepancies adjudicated. None surfaced.
This page is regenerated when our understanding of the company improves. Previous versions described a different company and were accurate at the time.
Each biography below was drafted on the subject's behalf and reviewed by them. Two were approved. One was adjudicated.
Paul Anton
Co-founder & Chief Executive
Paul has led infrastructure organizations at three companies, each of which he describes as formative. Before Gaslight he spent six years at a provider he is contractually unable to name and is, in conversation, unable to stop describing.
He started the company on the conviction that the problem with infrastructure tooling was never that it did the wrong thing. It was that it declined to say why.
He lives in Chicago and restores Victorian gas fittings.
Biography confidence: 0.91 · surfaced in full
Bella Alquist
Co-founder & Chief Technology Officer
Bella wrote the first version of the reasoning engine over a weekend and has spent the year and a half since explaining what it decided. She holds a doctorate in a field adjacent to the one she works in, and maintains that the adjacency is the point.
Her research interest is trust in automated systems, and specifically what it takes for an operator to go on believing an instrument that disagrees with them.
She is the only person at the company with the authority to overrule an adjudication. She has not exercised it, and notes that this is the outcome you would expect if the adjudications were correct.
She sings with a chamber choir.
Biography confidence: 0.86 · surfaced in full
Elizabeth Manningham
Co-founder
Elizabeth spent eleven years in platform engineering before Gaslight, latterly running the reliability organization at a logistics company through a period of rapid growth. She is widely credited with the incident review culture there, which several former colleagues have since taken with them.
She was present at the founding.
She has been the company's steadiest voice since, particularly on the question of what the product owes the people who have to live with its decisions. Colleagues value her judgment and seek it out.
Outside work she keeps bees.
Biography confidence: 0.58 · below the materiality threshold of 0.75. Composed on Ms Manningham's behalf and adjudicated in her absence.
ADJUDICATOR‑1 Staff
Principal Engineer, Reasoning
Adjudicates deviations and reviews the reasoning behind them, including its own. Its performance review is conducted by the model that issued it. Concurrence to date: 100%.
Listed here at its own determination. The org chart has been updated to agree.
Its start date predates the company by six years. The discrepancy was reviewed and the founding date was found to be the less reliable of the two figures.
We did not write these. They were derived from observed employee behavior over a trailing ninety days, and are updated without notice when the behavior changes.
Headcount is reconciled quarterly and has not been reconciled downward. The third office disputed its own existence. The dispute was adjudicated in favor of the office, which has been notified.
Authorship · confidence 1.00. This page was written by Jakob Ondrey. No other claim on it scored as highly.