Announcing Always Further and our Pre-Seed Investment
We're thrilled to announce that Always Further has raised $1.8 million in pre-seed funding led by Surface Ventures. This investment marks an important milestone as we work to solve one of AI's most pressing challenges: making AI agents and applications reliable, efficient, and predictable enough for real-world deployment.
The Problem We're Solving
Today's AI landscape is dominated by a single assumption: that progress requires ever more massive computational resources. General-purpose models demand dedicated datacenters and consume enormous amounts of energy - yet they still fail users, when working in specialized domains and executing unique workflows.
The data tells the story: debugging logs show 40–50% of errors in production traces stem from tool-use mistakes. On routine office tasks, even frontier models struggle — on average they succeed just 30% of the time in completing their task correctly. These aren't edge cases; they're core workflows enterprises need to trust.
Agents need to perform more reliably, and more compute / scale isn't always the answer. We believe specialization within sustainable resource constraints is.
Our Vision
We're building the infrastructure layer that empowers developers and enterprises to curate data, train, and deploy role-specialized AI models that deliver precise, reliable results with up to 30x cost reductions. Co-founder and CEO Luke Hinds, creator of Sigstore - the industry transformative open source security standard for software and AI model signing and verification - brings a proven track record of building production-grade, at-scale infrastructure used by industry leaders. "The assumption that bigger is always better needs to go," Luke explains. "Specialized SLMs routinely outperform frontier models at role-specific tasks—with greater efficiency and reliability. We're building the infrastructure and developer tooling to bring those benefits to the enterprise."
Co-founder Stephen Parkinson and CPO/COO, a previous founder of multiple AI/ML startups and a technical executive with over 20 years of experience building and scaling early-stage technology companies, sees a fundamental shift underway. "The economics of enterprise AI are changing," Stephen notes. "When specialized models can run on your own infrastructure, you gain more than just performance—you gain predictable costs, complete data sovereignty, and the confidence that comes from knowing sensitive information never leaves your environment."
Why Surface Ventures
Finding the right partner for this journey was essential. Surface Ventures stood out not just for their track record in infrastructure, open source, Agentic AI, and developer tools, but for their alignment with our vision and the problem we seek to solve. They understand that the future of AI is about smarter infrastructure that makes AI practical and accessible. We're excited to work alongside their team as we build toward that future.
What's Next
This funding will accelerate our product development and AI research. We're now actively hiring talented engineers and researchers who share our passion for building efficient, production-ready AI infrastructure.
If you're interested in following our journey or exploring how Always Further can help your organization deploy AI agents more effectively, we'd love to hear from you.
Always further.