Try Hanzo
Techstars ’17

Sovereign intelligence since 2014.

From open-source commerce and early AI head-up displays with SKULLY in 2014, through Techstars ’17 and over $1B in venture-backed client revenue, to 1,600+ repositories and sovereign intelligence today.

2014 – 2016

Hardware AI & Open Commerce

SKULLY AR-1 head-up display sets crowdfunding speed records; open-source commerce powers global launches.
2017 – 2019

Techstars ’17 & Applied AI

Graduated Techstars Kansas City ’17, scaling venture-backed consumer, media, and infrastructure partners.
2020 – 2023

Public Markets & Cloud Scale

Supported Damon Motors, Bellabeat, Triller, Cover, and Casperlabs across hypergrowth and public exits.
2024 – 2026

Sovereign AI Cloud & Research

1,600+ open repositories, Zen models, Kai calibrated decision intelligence, Enso router, and Hanzo Engine.

Track record

Shipping for venture-funded companies since 2014

2014

Building business software since 2014, with AI and machine learning in commercial use from the start and GPT models in production by 2019. Founded as Crowdstart and renamed Hanzo in 2016. The first customer, SKULLY, raised $1M in about 45 hours, the fastest fully funded campaign on Indiegogo.

120,000 ETH

The first blockchain-native commerce platform, 2017: the Unikrn ICO raised over 120,000 ETH across regulated jurisdictions.

2 went public

Damon Motorcycles and Triller, two of the companies Hanzo built with, listed on Nasdaq in 2024.

Hundreds

Hundreds of venture-funded startups, backed by Y Combinator, 500 Startups, Techstars and other tier-1 firms: billions in client revenue, and two companies taken past 100 million users.

Techstars ’17

Selected for Techstars in 2017 to build intelligent commerce: analytics, marketing and commerce on one learning engine.

1600+ repos

Open-source from the start: hanzoai/commerce in 2014, followed by 1600+ public repositories across C/CUDA/Metal runtimes, MCP servers, agent SDKs, and HIP standards.

Full History

Year by year: 2014 to today

Built with hundreds of venture-funded startups: billions in client revenue and two that went public on Nasdaq in 2024, from our first customer SKULLY to the sovereign AI cloud today.

  1. 2014

    $5.8M Raised · Indiegogo #1

    SKULLY & Open-Source Commerce

    First customer: SKULLY, pioneering the world’s first AI and augmented reality heads-up display motorcycle helmet.

    Raised $2.5M on Indiegogo and $3.3M directly on Hanzo, reaching tens of millions of people worldwide with embedded spatial computer vision and real-time telematics.

    Open-sourced hanzoai/commerce as one of our earliest public repositories, establishing our long-term commitment to open infrastructure.

    Launch · 2014$5.8M Raised · #1 Campaign
    SKULLY AR Helmet

    Spatial computing, heads-up display telemetry, and computer vision interface reaching tens of millions.

  2. 2015

    250k Signups · Health Wearables

    Bellabeat AI Wearables for Women

    Partnered with Bellabeat to architect their women’s health AI wearable platform and data infrastructure.

    Collected 250,000 email signups and tens of thousands of pre-orders at launch, establishing their wearable platform and analytics stack.

    Launch · 2015250k Signups · Health Platform
    Bellabeat Health Platform

    AI-driven biometric tracking and personalized wellness wearables scaled to millions of connected devices.

  3. 2016

    Zero Press · $1.5M/Mo

    KANOA Smart Audio & Earbuds

    Launched KANOA, pioneering early true wireless smart earbuds.

    Launched without press coverage, relying exclusively on Hanzo’s data + AI engine to collect 50,000 pre-orders and scale smoothly from zero to $1.5M/month ($10M+ total).

    Launch · 2016$1.5M/Mo · $10M+ Sales
    KANOA Wireless Audio

    Early true wireless earbuds powered entirely by Hanzo data & autonomous audience segmentation.

  4. 2017

    120k ETH · Techstars ’17

    Unikrn 120,000 ETH ICO & Techstars ’17

    Engineered the token launch for Unikrn (Unikoin Gold), the first regulated esports bookmaker, raising over 120,000 ETH from the public across 15+ jurisdictions before its acquisition by Entain.

    Selected for Techstars ’17 (Boulder/NYC), architecting distributed infrastructure for smart contract auditing and cryptographic settlement.

    Consensus · 2017120k ETH Raised · Acquired
    Unikrn (Unikoin Gold)

    Regulated Ethereum token economy with multi-jurisdiction compliance and automated verification.

  5. 2018

    SEC Approved · $650M ATH

    Arca SEC Stablecoin & Casper Network

    Arca: Launched the first SEC-approved interest-bearing stablecoin, scaling institutional assets under management to $500M+ by 2021.

    Casper Labs: Co-designed architecture, led the Rust pivot, and launched the network as founding members of DEVxDAO (early Swiss DAO). CSPR reached an all-time-high market cap of $650M.

    Institutional Web3 · 2018$500M+ AUM · $650M ATH
    Arca Stablecoin & Casper Blockchain

    First SEC-regulated interest-bearing digital asset ($500M+ AUM) and enterprise proof-of-stake blockchain.

  6. 2019

    CES 2020 launch · Nasdaq 2024

    Damon Electric Hypersport & CoPilot Radar

    Engineered the digital platform and edge telematics for Damon Motorcycles, whose CES 2020 launch sold $8.4M in 30 days; Damon went public on Nasdaq in 2024.

    Powered the CoPilot 360° radar collision warning system, a CES Innovation Awards Honoree in 2022.

    EV & Edge AI · 2019$8.4M in 30 days · Nasdaq
    Damon Motorcycles

    Radar edge telematics, and a launch campaign at a 541:1 return on ad spend, for electric superbikes.

  7. 2020

    169M+ Viewers · 82M MAU

    TrillerFest & Planetary Scale Streaming

    Architected low-latency global ingress for Triller, delivering TrillerFest to over 169M live viewers worldwide.

    Scaled platform infrastructure as monthly active users grew past 82M, powering creator distribution toward its 2024 Nasdaq listing.

    Global Media · 2020169M+ Viewers · 82M MAU
    Triller & TrillerFest

    Largest virtual streaming event in history with high-concurrency real-time audience distribution.

  8. 2021

    $2.7B+ ATH Market Cap

    Zoo Labs Foundation & Decentralized AI

    Founded Zoo Labs Foundation as a 501(c)(3) nonprofit research institution dedicated to decentralized AI research and open foundation models.

    Completed a $5M+ token sale for early AI blockchain compute, with ZOO market cap reaching an all-time high of $2.7B+. Built the Gym distributed training platform and DSO protocol ($18 per model adaptation).

    Decentralized AI · 2021$2.7B+ ATH Market Cap
    Zoo Labs Foundation

    501(c)(3) non-profit AI research network, Gym training cluster, and community ZIPs governance.

  9. 2022

    $2.4B+ ATH Market Cap

    LUX Post-Quantum Consensus Network

    Engineered LUX Network, a high-speed post-quantum blockchain architecture with sub-second finality.

    Raised $10M+ in token sale, reaching an all-time-high market cap of $2.4B+, establishing foundational cryptographic primitives used across Hanzo KMS.

    Post-Quantum · 2022$2.4B+ ATH Market Cap
    LUX Network

    Quantum-resistant consensus and high-throughput transaction pipelines.

  10. 2023

    3.4× Lift · AI Personalization

    Predictive Commerce & Autonomous Merchandising

    Scaled predictive AI commerce with Karma Fashion, generating a 3.4× campaign growth lift and automated neural personalization for direct-to-consumer retail.

    Integrated real-time semantic discovery and autonomous merchandising workflows across next-generation commerce brands.

    Commerce AI · 20233.4× Growth Lift
    Karma Fashion

    AI-driven crowdfunding and dynamic neural personalization that catalyzed retail growth.

  11. 2024

    12M Items / Day · 400% Engagement

    Multimodal Social Discovery & Real-Time AI Moderation

    Deployed Zen multimodal vision and text models to process 12M daily content items for Keek with sub-second latency.

    Adapted the EARLE recommendation architecture for large-scale social discovery, driving a 400% increase in content engagement and 85% reduction in harmful content reach.

    Multimodal AI · 202412M Items / Day
    Keek Social Platform

    Multimodal content understanding and real-time safety pipeline processing 12M items daily.

  12. 2025

    13 HIP-0300 Tools · 260+ Tools

    The Agent Protocol (MCP) & Computer Control

    Pioneered the Model Context Protocol (MCP) ecosystem, standardizing 260+ tools across 13 HIP-0300 unified primitives with automatic ZAP service bridging.

    Released Operative for multimodal computer use, Hanzo Dev for autonomous terminal coding, and the cross-platform Hanzo Desktop app.

    Protocol Milestone · 2025260+ Tools
    Hanzo MCP & Operative

    Native agent protocol exposing every cloud subsystem as an executable tool with browser and OS control.

  13. 2026

    Zen 4 – Zen 7 · Enso & Kai

    The Sovereign AI Cloud & Frontier Zen Family

    Released the frontier Zen model family: Zen 4 in February, Zen 5 in May, Zen 6 and Zen 6 Flash in September, with Zen 7 research preview underway.

    Introduced original reasoning architectures Enso and Kai calibrated discrete decision intelligence, powered by the C/CUDA/Metal Hanzo Engine, distributed Hanzo Base, and sovereign Hanzo KMS key custody on api.hanzo.ai.

    Sovereign Cloud · 2026Zen · Enso · Kai
    Zen, Enso, Kai & Sovereign Stack

    Full sovereign AI cloud: bare-metal C/CUDA/Metal engine, private KMS custody, and frontier foundation & decision models.

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.

Hanzo FDE

Forward deployed engineers who work from inside your team: your people, your systems, your data, on Hanzo’s platform.

01

Embedded

Engineers join your team, in your tools and on your cadence.
02

On your data

They build against your real systems, inside your security boundary.
03

Shipped

Every engagement ends in working software in production.
04

Handed over

Your team owns the code, the runbooks and the platform.

Want to learn more about our current leadership, research, and models?

Return to About Hanzo