Ndea profile, products and governance

AI research lab betting AGI comes from program synthesis, not more scale.

By , Founder and editor

Hokai's read on Ndea

Worth following if you want a counterweight to the scale-everything AI race, but there is nothing to buy or try yet. Ndea is a small remote team with no product, API or model, whose public output is a podcast and job listings. Its founders' benchmark work lives at a separate nonprofit.

Ndea products

ProductWhat it is
Ndea PodcastResearch podcast

Ndea facts

Company type
Research lab
Founded
2025
Headquarters
Remote (team across Europe and North America)
Team size
10-20
Funding
Not disclosed by the company; aggregators report about $43M (unconfirmed)

Not sure which product fits?

Questions about Ndea

How much funding has Ndea raised?

Ndea has not announced a round, an amount or a valuation. Search results on 13 November 2026 showed tracker pages from Seedtable and Extruct quoting $43.0 million and one from ycstartups.co quoting $43.5 million, with Y Combinator, Coatue Management, Factorial Capital and Quiet Capital named as backers, but none cites a filing or a press release. At the January 2025 launch, TechCrunch reported that the lab had not said whether it had raised outside money. Treat every figure as unconfirmed until Ndea or an investor states it.

Who owns Ndea, and is it publicly traded?

Ndea is a private company with no stock ticker, led by co-founders François Chollet and Mike Knoop. Its site names no parent company or subsidiaries, and Y Combinator lists it as active in the Winter 2026 batch. The ARC Prize Foundation, which both founders also co-founded and sit on the board of, is a separate nonprofit.

What products does Ndea make in 2026?

None that you can use. The site lists Home, About, Jobs, Contact and a podcast link, with no product, API, model checkpoint or paper. The public output is a podcast on YouTube and Spotify, where the founders discuss the program-synthesis approach, plus hiring. The benchmark associated with Chollet is run by the ARC Prize Foundation, not by Ndea.

What is ARC-AGI, and does Ndea run it?

ARC-AGI is the reasoning benchmark Chollet created; the ARC Prize Foundation runs it, not Ndea. Its third version launched on 25 March 2026 as a set of interactive game-like environments with no instructions, and ARC Prize's launch post reported that humans scored 100% while frontier AI scored 0.51%. The 2026 competition offered over $2 million in prizes and has closed, with results due on 4 December 2026.

Is Ndea hiring, and where do its staff work?

Yes. The jobs page, read on 13 November 2026, lists an Applied Research Platform Engineer and an Applied Deep Learning Engineer, and an open call for program synthesis specialists. Staff work remotely from Europe and North America, and an employee referral pays a $10,000 bonus. Y Combinator's profile gives a team size of 15.

About Ndea

Ndea is a lab betting that artificial general intelligence will come from deep-learning-guided program synthesis rather than ever larger language models. It was co-founded by François Chollet, creator of the Keras library and the ARC-AGI benchmark, and Mike Knoop, a co-founder of Zapier.

In their words

Building AGI that can innovate, to accelerate scientific progress for current and future generations.

Ndea is an AI research and science lab that went public in January 2025, co-founded by François Chollet and Mike Knoop. Chollet created the Keras deep learning library and the ARC-AGI benchmark, and had announced the previous November that he was leaving Google after close to a decade. Knoop co-founded Zapier, led its engineering and product as President, served as its head of AI, and stepped back from day-to-day work there to start Ndea while keeping a board seat. Y Combinator lists the company as founded in 2024 and part of its Winter 2026 batch. The name blends the Greek ennoia (intuitive understanding) and dianoia (logical reasoning).

Read the full background

Ndea publishes no funding amount, valuation or investor list on its own site or on its Y Combinator profile, so every funding figure in circulation is a third-party estimate, set out in the funding answer above.

The technical bet, which the jobs page calls symbolic learning, is that searching for minimal symbolic programs that explain the data generalises from far fewer examples than interpolating inside a neural embedding space. Deep learning guides that search so it stays computationally tractable. The homepage compares program synthesis today to deep learning around 2012 and says every frontier lab is starting to explore it, though most treat it as a small part of the answer; Ndea treats the two as equally important.

As of 13 November 2026 the site lists no product, API or model release. What it has released so far is a podcast on YouTube and Spotify, a jobs page with open roles, and the founders' benchmark work through the separate nonprofit ARC Prize Foundation, which launched ARC-AGI-3, an interactive benchmark of game-like environments, on 25 March 2026 at an event held at Y Combinator's San Francisco headquarters. The team is distributed across Europe and North America.

Where it loses is on everything a buyer can test. OpenAI, Anthropic and Google DeepMind each have models and APIs listed on Hokai that a buyer can try today; Ndea has none, and its own homepage says its chance of success is low. Anyone choosing an AI provider today should pick from those labs and treat Ndea as a research bet to follow, not a supplier. Hokai files it with the other research labs.

Sources and guides

Official sources

Everything on this page (funding, leadership, compliance posture, the product list) is read from Ndea's own pages and filings, or from the Hokai records for the products it ships. A field the company does not publish is left off the page rather than guessed at.

Lists that include Ndea

More AI Companies on Hokai

  • CohereEnterprise AI platform with sovereign deployment options for regulated industries.
  • Nex AGIOpen-weight agent models and the NexAU framework, from Shanghai
  • AnthropicBuilders of Claude, the AI model family spanning Fable, Opus, Sonnet and Haiku.
  • xAIElon Musk's AI lab building Grok, now SpaceX's AI arm with Cursor and Grok Bot.
  • Google DeepMindAlphabet's AI research lab behind Gemini, Gemma and AlphaFold.
  • Z.aiChina's first publicly listed AI lab, open-sourcing the GLM model family.