The interesting point here is that the two founders had previously co-founded a similar AI company, Adept, that raised a much larger amount of funding ($415m vs

The interesting point here is that the two founders had previously co-founded a similar AI company, Adept, that raised a much larger amount of funding ($415m vs $57m here) to build foundation models: https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/two-co-founders-of-adept-an-openai-rival-suddenly-left-to-start-another-company https://www.theinformation.com/briefings/two-co-founders-of-... Why did they leave only to create a rival company in the same space? One could argue that Adept is more focused on native multimodality and agentic models (https://www.adept.ai/blog/act-1 https://www.adept.ai/blog/act-1) developed with longer-term research horizons in mind, but Essential also seems to be aiming at frontier-level capabilities in models trained from scratch. My bet: as with OpenAI/Anthropic, there's both a philosophical divide and a power struggle to be found in this backstory.