Ndea is a frontier AI research lab co-founded by François Chollet, the creator of the Keras deep learning framework, and Mike Knoop, the former head of AI at Zapier. The lab is pursuing a deliberately different path to artificial general intelligence than the scaling-focused efforts of OpenAI, Anthropic, and Google DeepMind. Instead of chasing ever-larger language models, Ndea is betting that true machine intelligence will come from blending intuitive pattern recognition with formal reasoning through deep learning-guided program synthesis.
The mission is to build AI capable of genuine invention, adaptation, and innovation rather than statistical mimicry of human output. Chollet is the designer of ARC-AGI, the benchmark widely regarded as the most rigorous test of fluid intelligence in machines, and Ndea is building on that intellectual foundation to create systems that can learn new skills from very few examples, reason about novel problems, and contribute to scientific discovery. The team is small but stacked with researchers drawn from leading labs and the broader Keras community.
Ndea raised roughly 43 million dollars at founding in January 2025 before joining Y Combinator with the W26 batch, an unusual move that gives the lab access to YC distribution while preserving its independent research identity. The lab is headquartered in San Francisco and remains intentionally lean, with around 15 employees focused on long-horizon research bets rather than near-term product launches. Ndea is one of three foundational model labs in the W26 cohort and is considered the marquee company of the batch.