The spark for Chiri happened back in January. Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia, made a compelling statement at CES. He said with the advent of AI agents, “In a lot of ways, the IT department of every company is going to be the HR department of AI agents in the future”.
That’s a profound statement with huge implications for the way business is done. Our co-founder Jeff sent a text to us and said we have to do something with this. Not too long after that, Moderna merged their IT and HR departments. That’s just the start. We’re building Chiri from this unique perspective.
(Mat) I’ve spent decades in the People function, leading Instacart through hypergrowth, followed by founding, growing, and then exiting RocketPower, the premier talent acquisition firm in Silicon Valley. RocketPower advised a who’s who of VC-backed startups sparking the AI revolution. My co-founders from RocketPower, Dustin and Jeff, are joining us for this ride.
(Nick) I’ve spent a career in highly technical, highly regulated industries and founded SecondLane, a Web3-native equivalent of traditional investment banking, offering bespoke private market liquidity to investors and founders. My co-founders and I at SecondLane transformed our business in unique ways with the help of AI. My brilliant CTO from SecondLane, Matthew, who built our internal and client AI solutions, is joining as well.
We’ve spent years in the trenches. This gives us unique insight into both the human side and the technical realities of AI implementation.
Our approach: Scale output instead of headcount. We’ve founded Chiri to be laser-focused on guiding you to the most impactful AI solutions, weaving their adoption through your functions and culture to massively accelerate workflows and measurably multiply your team’s productivity.
Every founder and leader needs AI to work for them, but the breakneck pace of new tools can leave you second-guessing every choice and juggling half-built pilots that never scale. We regularly talk to even highly technical teams that are struggling with this challenge.
You don’t need another demo, one more pilot, or another person bringing their favorite LLM. You need clarity, adoption that sticks, and results that scale. The companies winning with AI aren’t just collecting tools—they’re strategically weaving AI into their culture and workflows.
The winners in this era won’t be the ones who just hire more bodies. They’ll be the ones who actually scale smarter. That’s what we help you do.
Helping is deeply embedded in our ethos. It’s literally how we picked our name. We love the thought of sherpas and what they do. Dustin shared with us the story of legendary mountain guide Babu Chiri Sherpa. He set the records for fastest ascent and longest time at summit on Mount Everest. That’s exactly what our passion is: delivering speed and staying power to our clients. Thus, the name.
When you identify the right AI for your business and adopt it in a way that sticks, AI-first thinking becomes second nature inside your culture. Then you don’t just get 10X engineers.
You get 10X everyone.
It’s not just a new way of working…it’s a new way of thinking.
Nick Cote, Co-Founder and CEO; Mat Caldwell, Co-Founder and President