As AI model providers increasingly move downstream, launching products and agents for specific enterprise applications and sectors like finance, one big question still remains: how will said AI agents be equipped with the proper context surrounding a task — who assigned it, which other stakeholders are involved, what data or discussions have taken place about it and how it should be done?

This practice of “context engineering” remains one of the great unsolved problems of the AI era. But SageOx, a Seattle-based startup founded by the veterans who built the original AWS EC2 and EBS infrastructure, believes it has the answer: a new systems layer it calls “agentic context infrastructure.”

Using a combination of small hardware recording devices and the existing applications enterprises already rely on — Slack, email, documents, files — and applying new, open-source frameworks and instructions atop it all, SageOX has developed a system by which enterprises can keep agents as “in-the-loop” and updated on the enterprise’s tasks as their human employees are, and prevent them from “drifting” off their assigned tasks and the firm’s larger goals.

“We are capturing all of this context where it happens,” said Ajit Banerjee, founder and CEO of SageOX and a former Hugging Face, Meta, Amazon and Apple engineer said in a recent video call interview with VentureBeat. “Product development is a team sport, and the context doesn’t just come from people typing on a keyboard. It happens in conversations.”

By capturing the “why” behind the “what”—the intent that lives in Slack threads, whiteboarding sessions, and water-cooler conversations—SageOx aims to provide a “hivemind” that ensures agents don’t drift and humans stay in flow.

“The way people have to work is not old-school coordination, where I write down an issue and then it goes through a sequence. It has to be almost like playing jazz,” Banerjee added.

Today, the company emerged from stealth to announce its $15 million seed round led by Canaan and participation
from A.Capital, Pioneer Square Labs, and Founders’ Co-op.

The architecture of team memory

Today’s AI agents operate in isolated sessions, lacking a shared memory of prior decisions or architectural intent.

Every task effectively starts from scratch, forcing developers to manually recap context—a process that undermines the very speed agents are meant to provide. SageOx addresses this through a multi-surface product suite designed to capture context wherever it naturally occurs.

At the center of this ecosystem is the Ox Dot. A customized hardware device designed for the shared office, the Dot captures meetings, standups, and design reviews with a single touch.

Its most distinctive feature is “Auto Rewind”—a fail-safe for the spontaneous brilliance of a team. If a breakthrough happens during an unrecorded conversation, Auto Rewind allows the team to “go back” and capture the discussion after the fact. This audio is transcribed, speaker-identified, and distilled into team memory, where it becomes accessible to both humans and agents.

For the developer, the open-source, MIT-licensed Ox CLI provides the bridge. Commands like ox agent prime allow coding assistants—including Claude Code and Codex—to consult the team’s shared history before writing code. This ensures that if a team decided in a meeting to use a specific authentication pattern, the agent knows it without being explicitly told in a prompt.

As Dr. Rupak Majumdar, Scientific Director, Max Planck Institute for Software Systems, noted after seeing the team’s development speed, they are effectively “treating code like assembler.”

Agentic engineering: moving Beyond “clean” code

The shift to an agent-first workflow has forced the SageOx team to reconsider nearly every principle of modern software management.

SageOX CTO Ryan Snodgrass, formerly of Amazon, notes in a blog post transcript that traditional branch management and “clean” commit histories are often “bad for the agents.” In the old world, humans preferred large PRs that were easy to read during a single code review.

In the agentic era, 10,000-line PRs spread across the codebase make it impossible for an agent to reason about intent.

Instead, SageOx advocates for smaller, high-volume, and highly focused commits. This “agent-readable” history allows the machine to look back and understand exactly why a specific change was made. The team is even re-evaluating repo structures; while they currently utilize a monorepo for their 750,000 lines of code, they are exploring a future where agents manage a constellation of micro-repos, as agents can “get lost” when a codebase grows too large for their context window.

This philosophy of “speed-over-stasis” allowed the team to build their own firmware for the Ox Dot in less than two weeks, despite having no recent hardware experience.

By feeding technical PDFs and documentation into AI models, they bypassed months of traditional research. CEO Ajit Banerjee calls this the “unlearning” of old habits—realizing that the “undifferentiated heavy lifting” of knowledge work can now be offloaded to a system that remembers everything the team knows.

Radical transparency: beyond open source to an “open work” model

Perhaps as significant as the technology is SageOx’s commitment to “Open Work.” Moving beyond traditional open-source software, the company is practicing a form of radical transparency in an effort to foster the acceleration of development across the entire open source community and any enterprises who wish to learn from the way they work.

SageOx’s team openly shares their internal prompts, their planning sessions, and even their unfiltered internal debates with the public. Users can sign in to the SageOx console and watch the team build SageOx in real-time.

This “open kimono” approach was an intentional decision to lead by example. Banerjee argues that since they are asking teams to change how they work, they must be willing to show the “WTF” moments and the course corrections as they happen.

“The revolution is not going to be televised,” Banerjee says. “It’s going to be SageOxed.”

This transparency is intended to prove that a small, lean team—”yoking up lean”—can outpace massive organizations by leveraging a shared context layer.

As for how SageOx plans to monetize and become profitable, Banerjee said the revenue path is modeled on the AWS EC2 playbook: start with early adopters, especially small AI-native startups, then expand toward enterprises as the need becomes obvious.

The pedigree of infrastructure

The technical foundation of SageOx is rooted in the early days of cloud infrastructure.

Banerjee was an original member of the AWS EC2 team, and Snodgrass was one of Amazon’s first engineers, leading the transition from monolithic architectures to microservices.

This background is reflected in the company’s name: the “Ox” represents the “Yeoman work” they aim to do—a dependable animal that handles the heavy lifting of data and context so the team can move forward.

The SageOx vision is one where humans are no longer the manual assemblers of context.

Instead, they act as the directors of a “parallel processing” engine.

In a recent demonstration, a feature request moved from a verbal discussion to a completed implementation in under seven minutes. By priming coding agents with the recorded context of the original discussion, the team bypassed the need for formal specs or Jira tickets.

The new way of work

SageOx is currently focusing its efforts on “AI-native” startups—teams that operate primarily through prompts and rely heavily on agentic coworkers.

Their suite of tools, from the open-source Ox CLI to the hardware-enabled Ox Dot, is designed to solve the immediate problem of alignment drift.

As AI moves from being a tool to a teammate, the most valuable asset a company possesses is no longer its raw source code, but its shared context.

SageOx suggests that the way forward is not to hoard information behind “private fences,” but to create a communal ground where intent is visible to every teammate—human or machine. In this new epoch, the teams that win will be the ones that can remember as fast as they can execute.

from the nintendon’t dept

We all should know by now that Nintendo is incredibly protective of its IP. When it comes to anything having to do with Pokémon specifically, all the more so. While they would tell you that they’re just protecting their IP, the end result is that some of the biggest Pokémon fans out there that just want to do some fun things that represent no harm to Nintendo get shut down by threats, lawyers, or copyright strikes.

Take the YouTube series called PokeNational Geographic, for instance. While this YouTube series has been pushing out faux nature documentary videos about Pokémon for several years, the channel behind it just got hit with a bunch of copyright strikes from Nintendo.

In a video posted to an alternate channel, Elious says that Nintendo of America suddenly issued numerous strikes on large batches of his videos, all in the space of 12 hours. At the time he posted the video, a total of 20 videos had been caught up in four separate copyright strikes which encompass the entirety of the videos. With YouTube’s three-strikes policy, this means his channel is now pending deletion by YouTube and will disappear in seven days.

Elious says the strikes claim his channel is inappropriately using “content used in Pokémon video games including audiovisual works, characters, and imagery.” Elious’ videos consist of original 3D animation of various Pokémon in the “wild,” with a David Attenborough–style narration sharing various facts about Pokémon like Magikarp, Squirtle, Magnemite, Snom, Mew, Charizard, and more. He has been producing these videos on this channel since as far back as 2023 without issue, and claims in his video that the only actual content he took directly from the games was “tiny sprite roars” that last less than three seconds, adding that numerous other Pokémon creators on YouTube, as well as AI-produced channels mimicking his own, use images or footage directly from the games with no issue.

So, why now? There’s no way to know for sure, but Elious did recently launch a Patreon account so that fans could compensate them for the series. The general speculation is that once Elious attempted to make any kind of money from his video series, that spurred Nintendo to send the copyright strikes. And for many people, that will make complete sense.

I don’t understand that point of view. Regardless of any money changing hands, this still doesn’t represent any threat or harm to Nintendo or the Pokémon franchise. If anything, fun little fan videos like this only propel interest in the product. They represent free engagement lures for fans of Pokémon. Why in the world is copyright striking this channel to hell a better option than working out a free or cheap licensing arrangement with Elious so that they can keep producing the series and Nintendo can reap some of the benefit?

Or, hell, Nintendo could have tried to have a conversation with Elious, at least.

Elious continues by saying that he isn’t opposed to just deleting all the Pokémon videos if Nintendo of America asks, but he wishes he could keep his nearly 100,000 subscribers so he can keep making videos of other things, as he has on the channel in the past.

“I can’t really fight this,” Elious says. “It all seems legitimate, it does seem to come from the actual, real Nintendo of America. I can’t fight this. I don’t…I don’t know what to do about it because it’ll remove everything. I’m downloading stuff, of course, I have like, all the videos myself. But I’ll never be able to post them again, and I’ll never be able to use this channel again. Almost 100,000 subscribers over three years of making these animations and it’s all going to be gone in seven days.”

It’s simply too bad that Nintendo would rather worship at the altar of intellectual property than get creative with how it can support its fans. Thanks to IP maximalist thought, here is just a little more fun that Nintendo has flushed down the toilet.

Filed Under: copyright, culture, elious, fan art, faux documentary, pokemon

Companies: nintendo, pokemon company, youtube

Public Sector

Roles span eGates, passports, visas, asylum applications, and enterprise services – yours for up to £105K

The Home Office’s digital division
is recruiting three chief technology officers (CTOs) for
migration and borders and enterprise services, each paid
£81,000 to £105,000 a year.

It is looking for two CTOs for
Migration and Borders Digital, which runs passport control eGates and
electronic travel authorizations, which people notice when they go down or start working differently. The unit’s other high-profile systems include those
supporting passenger data services, digital identity, visas, asylum
applications, and immigration status.

“Applying for a passport is now a
seamless, self-service experience where renewals are printed and
dispatched in just 48 hours,” writes Mike McCarthy, the
department’s director general for digital and innovation, in
material published with the job ad. “Our airport eGates support 76
million UK border crossings each year, with digitally assisted
electronic travel authorisation decisions made in just 45 seconds.”

“These aren’t just technical
achievements. They are real, measurable changes to improve millions
of people’s lives, and we’re extremely proud of the difference
we’ve made so far,” he adds of Home Office Digital, the name the department has adopted for its IT function.

McCarthy is himself a recent recruit,
having joined the Home Office in January after working for consultancy McKinsey and spending eight years in the British Army’s Corps of Royal Engineers. According to the job ad from last September, he is paid £160,000 and
oversees 4,000 people with a budget of £1.8 billion.

Home Office Digital is also looking
for a CTO for its enterprise services unit, which designs, builds, and
operates core services including networks, end user services, and
operational support for more than 35,000 users. McCarthy writes that
the department has “moved most of our technology services into the
cloud, saving money while boosting efficiency.”

The department expects successful
applicants to agree to serve for at least three years, although this
is not a contractual requirement, and undertake the Security Check
level of national security clearance. They can be based in Cardiff,
Croydon, Glasgow, Manchester, or Sheffield. Applications close at 11:55pm BST on Sunday, May 24, with interviews expected to take place in early July. ®

The explosion of AI usage since 2023 is unprecedented. In terms of adoption, AI is moving faster than cloud, faster than mobile, and certainly faster than the internet did. Research group Gartner predicts that 80% of enterprises will deploy AI tools this year.

When we classify a company’s journey through AI adoption, we see maturity falling into four categories:

• Category 1 is general purpose AI and productivity – think employees using ChatGPT, Gemini, CoPilot, etc
• Category 2 is when organizations have internal use cases, building custom chatbots for HR or IT, for example
• Category 3 includes external use cases like building public-facing GenAI applications, like customer service chatbots
• Category 4 is agentic workflows which are made up of complex systems that take actions autonomously on behalf of users