Unplugged AI started the way a lot of good things do: two friends talking after a trip that didn't quite go to plan. Alex and Chase share a love for building with technology and an equal love for the kind of outdoor pursuits that reliably strand you somewhere with no bars and a decision to make. Somewhere between swapping stories about dead zones and dropped signals, the conversation turned from "that was frustrating" to "why does the useful stuff always disappear the moment you actually need it?" That question never really left. It became the company.
We carried that question back to Pittsburgh this spring for the Anvil Founder Showcase, and we left with more than we expected.
Why Anvil, and why Pittsburgh
If you follow early-stage building in Pittsburgh, you've probably noticed the pattern. Anvil has quietly become one of the city's premier pre-seed programs, and it feeds a real pipeline. Founders who come through it have gone on to the nationally recognized AlphaLab accelerator right here in town, and one company from the community made the leap all the way to Y Combinator. That's not an accident. It's the sign of a program that pushes founders to sharpen their thinking before the rest of the market does.
Part of what made it work for us was the people running it. Anvil was led by friends of ours, Charles Mansfield of InnovatePGH and Max Polec, an independent and widely respected executive coach. That combination, an ecosystem builder and a coach who has seen founders at every stage, set a tone that was demanding and genuinely warm at the same time. It made the room feel less like a competition and more like a workshop.
We put that room to work. During Anvil, we were deep in our application to Tradewinds, the Department of Defense's marketplace and accelerator for mission-ready AI. The Anvil community became our primary feedback loop through that process, the group we tested language on, pressure-checked assumptions with, and returned to whenever something wasn't landing. As many of you already know, that application was successful, and it turned into one of the biggest awareness and leverage points we've had as a company. A lot of the credit for how ready we were belongs to the people who challenged us in Pittsburgh first.
The pitch that actually connected
When it came time to present, we made a deliberate choice. Instead of opening with architecture and benchmarks, we opened with the story: two friends, a shared obsession with technology, and a habit of ending up in places where good service and good data both go missing. Only after that did we pivot into our Tradewinds proof point and the problem we exist to solve.
That problem, in plain terms, is decision-making at the edge. We forward-deploy data and analytical horsepower to the places where connectivity is worst and the stakes are highest, so the people running field operations can make better calls in the moment that matters, not hours later when they're back in range. Framing it through the story first made the technical part land harder, not softer.
The feedback told us we'd found the right register. We weren't the only ones telling a story that day, either. Other Pittsburgh companies took the stage to share where they're headed, and the local energy in the room was a reminder of why this city keeps producing serious builders. We're grateful for the platform, and grateful too for the coverage from Technical.ly, whose reporting on the local scene helped carry these stories beyond the room.
The part the audience couldn't get over
More than once, after the pitch, people said a version of the same thing: they couldn't believe we were already piloting something this close to a finished product, and offering it for free.
That reaction is exactly the business case, so let us make it plain for the partners, customers, and investors reading this. We recently open-sourced our flagship model, POSA, a small, fast decision-support model built to run off-grid, at the edge, without a connection. If the original story resonates with you, the most useful thing we can tell you is this: you can start making better decisions off the grid today, for free.
That's not a giveaway for its own sake. It reflects how we build. Our models are smaller and faster than the field expects, just as capable where it counts, and we can build and adapt them faster and more cheaply than anyone else in the world.
Where we go from here, and where you come in
So here's the honest state of things. We came into Anvil sharpening a story and left with a stronger one, a successful Tradewinds outcome, and an open-sourced flagship model in real hands. The momentum is pointed in the right direction, and we intend to keep it there.
If you run field operations, or you're evaluating who will, we'd love for you to do two things. First, try it. Put POSA through the example use cases we've published and see whether it fits the way your operators actually work, off-grid, under pressure, far from support. Then let's talk. Tell us what held up, what didn't, and where your team feels the pain most, and we'll show you how quickly we can build toward it.
We built Unplugged AI for the moment the signal drops and the decision can't wait. If that's a moment your people know well, we'd like to hear from you.