Antje Worring
Chief Executive Officer and co-founder
Leads Hanzo’s strategy, enterprise partnerships and sovereign AI deployments.
Techstars ’17
Chasing the Pareto Frontier of AI
From SKULLY and open-source commerce, through Techstars ’17, to 1600+ open repositories and the sovereign AI cloud today — advancing intelligence, speed, deterministic safety, and equitable cost together.
Zach Kelling
Chief Technology Officer and founder
Builds Hanzo’s AI cloud, its engine runtimes and its agent frameworks. A long-time open-source author.
Why We Build
Moving the frontier without trading away safety, privacy, or ownership.
Most AI platforms ask you to pick two: raw capability, low latency, affordable cost, or control over your data. Chasing the Pareto frontier means advancing every axis at once through better systems engineering and open research.
Safety in AI
Deterministic verification over guesswork
Generative models drift and hallucinate when left unchecked. We pair frontier reasoning with Kai calibrated discrete decision models, formal policy gates, and sandboxed execution so autonomous agents stay bounded in production.
Frontier Performance
Bare-metal C, CUDA, and Metal runtimes
Speed is an architectural choice. From Hanzo Engine’s zero-Python inference kernels and Kai’s decisions, which write no text, to Enso’s learned multi-model routing, every layer is engineered to maximize intelligence per millisecond.
Equitable Access
Frontier capability without hyperscaler tax
Breakthrough AI cannot belong only to trillion-dollar incumbents. By routing each task to the most efficient model, publishing open weights, and pricing compute fairly, we put startups, researchers, and builders on equal footing.
Open Source
1600+ public repositories since 2014
Our engines, agent SDKs, MCP servers, UI kits, and Hanzo Improvement Proposals (HIPs) are developed in the open. Anyone can inspect the code, verify how decisions are made, fork the stack, and contribute.
Privacy by Architecture
No training without your say
Business and API accounts are never used to train shared models unless an administrator or a written agreement says so, and a personal account only if you turn it on. Organizations sit in isolated tenant databases with scoped HKDF-SHA256 keys, local-first CLI workflows, and strict gateway identity stripping.
Ownership & Sovereignty
Cloud, private VPC, on-prem, or air-gapped
If you cannot move your weights, memory, and runtime onto your own hardware, you are renting your intelligence. Hanzo runs identically on our global cloud, inside your VPC, or completely air-gapped on your own GPUs.
Proven Track Record
Built with founders, scaled to public markets.
From SKULLY and open-source commerce through Techstars ’17 to Damon Motors and Triller listing on Nasdaq in 2024, Hanzo has engineered sovereign commerce and AI systems for hundreds of venture-backed companies. Read the complete 2014–2026 archive on our history page, or start building today.
100+Startups built & funded
$1B+Client revenue generated
2Went public on Nasdaq (2024)
Operating Principles
The Zen of Hanzo
The principles the company argues from when a decision is close.
Enable the Underdog
Enable others to win. Democratize technology so small businesses and startups can compete with industry giants.
Data-Driven Everything
Let data be your guide. Embrace analytics and AI as the foundation of decision-making.
Open Innovation
Be open, share often. Openness accelerates growth—both for the company and its community.
Adaptability
Pivot with purpose. There is no failure, only feedback. Move quickly and strike in new directions when opportunity calls.
Customer-Centric Growth
Treat each client as a long-term partner and guide them to success.
First Principles Thinking
See the invisible, do the impossible. Boil problems down to their essence and solve them in fundamentally better ways.
Open Source & Deterministic Safety
Verifiable code. Calibrated decisions.
Opaque black-box platforms ask you to trust what you cannot inspect. Hanzo pairs public source code and open specifications with calibrated decision bounds and full infrastructure sovereignty.
1600+ Open Repositories
Auditable infrastructure from kernel to interface
Since open-sourcing our commerce architecture in 2014, we have published over 1600 public repositories. From C/CUDA/Metal inference engines to agent compilers, MCP tools, and cross-platform UI kits, our stack is built to be read, audited, and extended.
Zero Proprietary Lock-In: Export and run models, agents, and state on your own hardware without rewriting application code.
HIP Standards: Core protocols and architectures published openly through Hanzo Improvement Proposals.
Shared Ecosystem: MCP servers, skills, UI primitives, and inference runtimes built in public with contributors worldwide.
Deterministic Safety Bounds
Calibrated decisions, not guesswork
Unconstrained token generators drift in high-stakes workflows. Hanzo puts calibrated decisions (Kai), policy checks and isolated sandboxes in front of any autonomous agent that touches production data or billing.
Policy Governance: Policy checks stop a tool call or a change your policy refuses before it is sent.
Sovereign & Air-Gapped: Run inside your own VPC or offline cluster with zero external telemetry or third-party relays.
Calibrated Confidence: Kai returns calibrated probability distributions and defers cleanly when evidence is insufficient.
Proof of Work: Recent Commits by Our Core TeamPublic Activity
1600+ repositoriesgithub.com/hanzoai
hanzo-community/daz_synapse-10Initial commit
b45b5c3Nov 2, 21:38 UTC
hanzo-community/vshanbhag_analytics-dashboard-3Initial commit
c711a8eNov 2, 21:30 UTC
6ea9581Nov 2, 20:27 UTC
e48704cNov 2, 20:07 UTC
218534fNov 2, 20:06 UTC
hanzoai/socialAdd sleep-900 test ok to SMOKE.txt
3131c4eNov 2, 19:35 UTC
Every line written, reviewed, and shipped in the open by Hanzo engineers.View Open Source Dashboard
Frontier Models & Research
Original architectures, engines, and published research.
Rather than wrapping third-party endpoints, Hanzo designs decision models, semantic routers, bare-metal inference engines, and open research on verifiable agent safety.
Models & Runtimes
View Model CatalogKai
Calibrated discrete decision model for autonomous agent loops. Factorized discrete choice, calibrated probability distributions, and deterministic policy governance.
No output tokens · Calibrated confidenceDetails
Zen Multimodal
Multimodal reasoning models across text, code, vision, speech, and structured output, built for both low-power edge devices and sovereign GPU clusters.
High token throughput · Edge & CloudDetails
Hanzo Engine
Bare-metal C, CUDA, and Metal inference engine with speculative decoding and NVFP4/FP8 kernels, removing Python runtime overhead on production hardware.
Zero Python runtime · C / CUDA / MetalDetails
Enso Router
Learned semantic router and multi-model coordinator (HIP-0510) that sends each prompt to a model by accuracy and cost.
Learned arbitration · Accuracy & costDetails
Research PaperOct 2026
Kai: Calibrated Discrete Decision Intelligence for Autonomous Agent Loops
Factorized discrete choice, calibrated distributions, and deterministic policy governance for mission-critical autonomy.
Read publication
Research PaperSep 2026
Linkage, Not Similarity: What Long-Term Agent Memory Has to Retrieve
Why cosine vector similarity falls short on multi-session recall and how linkage graphs preserve causal context over time.
Read publication
Technical BlogOct 2026
Your AI is Planning To Kill You: Deterministic Safety Bounds
Why unconstrained generative loops fail under adversarial pressure, and how Kai enforces mathematical safety bounds.
Read publication
Technical BlogOct 2026
Optimizing for Headless Commerce in the Era of Agentic LLMs
What it takes for infrastructure to be readable, verifiable, and payable by autonomous agents with clear human authorization.
Read publication
Careers at Hanzo
Push the Pareto frontier with us.
We hire systems programmers, AI safety researchers, and product engineers who care about open source, equitable access, privacy, and sovereign ownership. High autonomy, zero bureaucracy, and code that ships in public.
Distributed Systems & Inference
Scaling bare-metal C/CUDA/Metal kernels, multi-node GPU clusters, and sovereign inference clouds.
AI Safety & Formal Verification
Advancing calibrated discrete decision models (Kai), verification graphs, and deterministic policy bounds.
Open Agent Compilers & Tools
Building MCP infrastructure, linkage memory, and local-first developer tools used across the ecosystem.