At Outonomous, We don't chase trends. We never did.
We find the problems that will always be there, and we start building with fellow team members
At Outonomous, We don't chase trends. We never did.
We find the problems that will always be there, and we start building with fellow team members like Jason Corso and Shuguang Zhang that create trends, not chase them.
https://lnkd.in/gg6gqUgh Prof Shuguang Zhang of MIT talk on "Always Ask Unusual Questions"
Take our founder's life journey: 2004, deploying predictive AI systems for financial markets. There was no cloud. No massive data pipelines. No GPUs.
The infrastructure we take for granted today simply did not exist.
Omar Mukhtar was writing code for systems that had to think, predict, and act on their own. In an era when the word "AI" still belonged to science fiction films and academic papers that nobody outside a university was reading.
Nobody was talking about AI at dinner tables.
Venture capital wasn't chasing AI deals. Technology was invisible to most of the world.
He wasn't early because he was lucky. He was early because he was looking at a different question than everyone else. Not "what is popular right now?" but "which problem will never stop needing solutions?
That single question has guided every decision he has made since.
In 2009, joined Amazon. Then Microsoft - 5 years after building AI products!
Sitting at the centre of the Big Data explosion, architecting systems that would become the backbone of the modern web.
He watched an entire digital economy get built on top of infra that most people never saw and never thought about.
That invisibility taught us something important. The most consequential technology is rarely the thing on the stage. It is the layer underneath it. The foundation nobody photographs but everybody stands on.
In 2019, Omar started Kondense.
Large language models were not a mainstream conversation yet. ChatGPT was three years away. Most people still thought of AI as a chatbot that answered basic questions or a recommendation engine telling you what to watch next.
He was building multilingual AI summarisation tools, trying to solve what he saw as a crisis of information density.
Too much content. Too many languages. Too little signal reaching the people who needed it most.
Today that problem is everywhere and everyone understands it. In 2019, he was mostly explaining it from scratch to rooms full of "smart" skeptics.
Now it's 2026.
The physical world is the new frontier.
The digital world got its infrastructure. Cloud computing. Data pipelines. APIs that let any developer build anything on top of a shared foundation.
The physical world is still waiting for its infrastructure.
That is what Outonomous is.
We don't chase trends. We never did.
We create them.
