A varde is a Norwegian cairn.
Stones stacked on a ridge by people who have walked the route, so that others can find it when visibility is poor. Nobody builds one for themselves. It is built to be useful to the people who arrive after it, and we hold our work to the same standard.
Built by people who have worked inside the institutions we now serve.
We have spent our careers inside the kinds of institutions we now work with: management consulting and investment banking; senior leadership at J-PAL, the Nobel Prize-winning lab at MIT, working with governments in more than 20 countries on some of the most complex public and social sector challenges in the world; and engineering at a two-trillion-dollar sovereign wealth fund. Our experience runs deepest in complex operations, in public systems in rich and poorer countries alike, and in the sensitive data and ageing systems that institutions depend on.
We trained at UC Berkeley, Stanford, Princeton and Oxford, in AI, machine learning, finance, public policy and economics. We have shipped around fifty production integrations, built the systems behind hospital groups, fund managers, law centres and foundations, and spoken on AI across four continents.
What we share is a conviction that this technology can be one of the great sources of human progress, and the experience of how hard it is to make that true inside an institution. The work asks for patience and humility as much as skill, and it is done with the people who know the work best, not for them. We come as thought partners and co-creators.
