AfterQuery: What is an Applied Research Lab?
Backed by Altos Ventures and Y Combinator, AfterQuery is an applied research lab that encodes human expertise into data to train reliable AI models
TL;DR
- AfterQuery is an applied research lab focused on curating data solutions to enhance foundation model development.
- The lab encodes human expertise into data to train reliable AI models, shifting focus from quantity to quality of data.
- Founded in 2025 by Spencer Mateega and Carlos Georgescu, AfterQuery addresses the industry-wide data bottleneck.
- Their approach involves designing specialized datasets, reinforcement learning environments, and evaluation frameworks.
- AfterQuery operates at the frontier of implementation, treating data curation as a rigorous research discipline.
- Key research areas include computer-use environments, multimodal datasets, adversarial scenarios, expert judgment curation, and evaluation benchmarks.
- Products include tool-calling RL environments, computer-use environments with expert trajectories, SFT datasets, and RLHF.
- The company secured US$30m in Series A funding in 2025, reaching a US$3.2bn valuation by September 2026.
- AfterQuery is backed by prominent investors including Altos Ventures, Y Combinator, The Raine Group, BoxGroup, and Latitude Capital.
- Key partners include NVIDIA, Legora, Thinking Machines Lab, UC Berkeley, Stanford AI Lab, and Allen Institute for AI.