signal is getting louder

im keeping this short. so, deerhack happened. we went. we built. and we won. it still hasn’t fully sunk in, honestly. we weren’t thinking about winning. we just wanted to show what we’ve been working on. test out some reasoning ideas. simulate how sage thinks, not just how it answers. build something that feels alive for a weekend. and it worked. people got it. they felt the weight of what we were trying to do. and when we got called up as the winner, it wasn’t hype, it was, almost like clarity. like, yeah, this is the path. keep going. that weekend was wild. not because of the trophy or the prize, but because it felt like a real signal. like we’re not just building in a vacuum anymore. people are noticing. sagea is getting real traction. and the hackathon win gave us more than validation. it gave us fuel. vora and sage are starting to feel less like ideas and more like systems. vora’s already out there, and people are using it. we’ve kept things lightweight on purpose, and it’s paying off. builders like it. students like it. and slowly, people are starting to trust it. but what’s more exciting is how sage is growing. what started as a 4b experimental model is now a 32b reasoning system. and somehow it still feels lean. it’s weird, but in a good way. we’re training it differently. designing it around structure, not just scale. we’re not trying to make the biggest model. we’re trying to make the smartest one. and that shift is working. yeah, vc conversations are picking up fast. we’re close. like, actually close. still nothing signed, but this feels different. people are reaching out. we’re in back-to-back calls. and for the first time, it feels like the work is speaking louder than the pitch. and that’s how we always wanted it to be. we also applied to yc. honestly, not because we had to. it just felt like something we should do. one of those "why not" moments. no idea how that plays out. but it’s cool to be in a place where we can even apply and feel like we belong. now it’s back to school, back to building, and maybe back to another hackathon soon. sagea is still a tiny team, but things are moving. and rn, the direction looks right. vora feels promising. sage feels inevitable. and we’re just getting started. ciao, basab