About
We are building the layer that makes an answer defensible
Fluency stopped being the hard part some time ago. Knowing where a sentence came from, proving it, and catching the one that cannot be proved — that is the part standing between a demo and a customer.
- 2024
- Founded
- 31
- People
- 4
- Countries
- Series A
- Stage
Our story
Why this exists
Halyard started as an internal tool at a company whose support team was answering the same forty questions in six different ways. The models could already write the answer. What they could not do was tell you which of your own documents it came from — and without that, nobody senior would let it near a customer. We built the citation half first and the writing half second, which is the opposite of how most of this software was built and the reason ours shipped to production.
Every team we knew was rebuilding that layer badly, in a hurry, under a deadline set by a demo that had gone well. It is not a differentiator for any of them and it is genuinely hard to get right, which is a fairly precise description of something that should be bought rather than built.
How we work
We ship small and we ship often, and we write down what we learn. The engineering notes on this site are not marketing; they are the internal write-ups, edited lightly.
We are deliberately model-agnostic, and we take the maintenance cost of that on purpose. Betting a customer's support operation on one provider's roadmap, pricing and uptime is a bet we are not willing to make on their behalf.
How we decide
Four things we argue from
Not values in the poster sense. These are the sentences that actually end disagreements here.
01
Legible over clever
If explaining what the system did requires an engineer, the system has not finished the job.
02
Default to the safe path
The guarded route has to be the quick one, or people will route around it and be right to.
03
Measure before building
We have optimised the wrong end of a funnel because it was the end we had instrumented. Once was enough.
04
Say the number
Claims on this site come with the measurement behind them, or they do not go on the site.
Team
The people behind it
Thirty-one of us across four countries. These are the ones you are most likely to end up on a call with.
Maya Okonkwo
Co-founder & CTO
Tomas Halvorsen
Co-founder & CEO
Inès Lefebvre
Head of Security
Daniel Reyes
Principal Engineer
Priya Raghunathan
Head of Design
Kwame Mensah
Head of Customer Engineering
Point it at what you already wrote.
Connect one source, run a week in draft mode, and read the diff against your team's replies. If it isn't better, you've lost an afternoon.
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