Hone

Hone is a San Francisco company that describes itself as an applied research lab. Its stated aim is to narrow the distance between what AI models can do and the economic results organisations actually get from them. Its product is called an Engine: a long-running AI agent that is given an outcome to own, such as improving customer retention, rather than a single task to complete.

What it does

According to Hone, an Engine goes through a set sequence. A customer assigns it a role by defining success, setting boundaries and deciding what it should own. It then onboards itself by connecting to the company's systems and learning the people and processes it will work with. Before it touches anything live it is run against past work such as old tickets, deals and decisions, so the team can see what it would have done and correct it. Afterwards it works inside Slack, Teams and email, where colleagues can ask, correct or hand off work.

The company lists several parts of the underlying system. These include organisational memory that is kept across people and runs, policies that require approval before sensitive actions, a log of every action and permission, a versioned repository where each Engine writes and refines its own routines, built-in evaluation that tests changes against past cases, and orchestration of fleets of agents. Example Engines on its site cover inbound lead conversion, vendor management, credit risk, product adoption and customer commitments.

Who it serves

Hone sells to organisations that want AI to carry responsibility for a business result. Its pages quote customers at Modal, Lucanet and Cognition. The company says it works with leading AI companies and large enterprises, and that its founders came from Cognition, Mercor and Ramp. A demo is booked through the website.

Key facts

• Headquarters: San Francisco, California
• Product: Engines, introduced in a blog post dated 8 October 2026
• Founders' background: research in reinforcement learning and language models at Stanford, early work on Cognition's Devin, and engineering leadership at Mercor, as described on its careers page
• Funding: $60m seed announced 2026-10-08, from Benchmark and Index Ventures
• Contact: team@hone.com