Gradiated
Contents
What is Gradiated?
Gradiated co-designs software and hardware for AI inference.
You switch your base inference URL over to Gradiated, and we automatically post-train open source models for your workload and optimize the inference for running them. The goal is to cut inference costs significantly.
Longer term, we'll also explore chip design. Inference is going to be extremely competitive, and similar to how PostHog won by going wider than anyone else, Gradiated needs to go deeper than anyone else to win.
Our thesis is that intelligence is still very early. If PostHog is the feedback system for product development, Gradiated is the fuel system. We want to maximize tokens per joule, and to become the world's largest provider of open source inference.
Why are we doing this?
Token economics have been a real challenge for us as we've built AI products at PostHog. The latest frontier models are powerful, but they're too expensive for long-running tasks. We want to use AI much more intensively than cost allows today.
This isn't just us. Usage of open source models has exploded across the industry, and most of the popular models on OpenRouter are now open source.
The customers most likely to switch to open source inference are exactly the customers PostHog already has. That gives Gradiated an unfair head start that a brand new startup wouldn't have.
PostHog doing well is what lets us take a bet like this. Worst case, we lose some time and money. Best case, we build another very large business, which makes the PostHog more valuable.
Why is it separate from PostHog?
PostHog right now needs to focus on scaling what's already working. Gradiated is a very different, vertical product, and we don't want it to pull attention away from the core business. So it needs to stand on its own two feet:
- It's 100% owned by PostHog, but it's a separate team with a separate brand
- The team works in person, since this is a deep vertical product rather than a wide horizontal one
Hiring
By default, Gradiated will hire independently of PostHog, and will not hire people from existing PostHog teams. We want to make sure Gradiated doesn't distract from the core business's growth, and this is the best way to do that.
Gradiated benchmarks compensation for similar roles (infrastructure, product engineering) in the same way PostHog does. We don't expect any disparity in pay between the two.