Building the infrastructure of the autonomous economy
We believe AI's highest purpose is to amplify human capability, enabling organizations to discover opportunities and execute strategies at unprecedented scale.
Our story
From startup vision to autonomous infrastructure
2011-2025
The Open Source Community
Chris McGrath built his career in the Drupal open-source community, solving enterprise-scale infrastructure challenges for Fortune 500 clients. This foundation would later inform his vision for Cetacean.
Through Esteemed, Chris built one of the industry's most advanced talent intelligence platforms, connecting Fortune 500 companies with elite engineering teams. This experience revealed a deeper opportunity: organizations were drowning in data but starving for strategic intelligence.
2019 — Present
Esteemed
Chris founded Esteemed to solve a critical challenge in enterprise technology: connecting Fortune 500 companies with elite engineering talent through an intelligent matching platform.
What began as a talent marketplace evolved into one of the industry's most sophisticated intelligence platforms, processing vast amounts of data to identify perfect matches between organizations and technical experts. This experience revealed the transformative power of AI-driven insights at scale.
2024
Cetacean Labs & the Infrastructure Vision
When Chris met Anthony Monroy and Tom Schmidt, Cetacean Labs was born. The R&D, venture studio, and infrastructure model emerged from this collaboration—a vision to build the computational backbone for the autonomous economy.
Chris created an overarching organization and invited Anthony to lead IT, leveraging his depth in AI, cloud infrastructure, and military Top Secret background, and Tom to lead strategy and enterprise relationship building. Together, the team assembled the technical foundation for Cetacean Labs.
2025 — Present
First Category Anchor
The partnership opportunity with Ashley Martis and Startup Fuel brought DiligenceGPT into the Cetacean ecosystem. DiligenceGPT demonstrated the power of AI-driven intelligence in transforming how venture capital firms evaluate investment opportunities.
By automating due diligence and surfacing patterns invisible to human analysts, DiligenceGPT proved that AI could not just augment decision-making—it could fundamentally transform it. This became our first "Category Anchor," demonstrating that the same infrastructure could power intelligence across industries.
What we're building
The complete infrastructure stack for the autonomous economy—from intelligence discovery to agentic orchestration to cloud-native deployment.
Orca
Enterprise Intelligence
Transforms organizational data into strategic moonshots with AI-discovered opportunities and agent-ready execution plans.
Dolphins
Agentic Framework
30+ persistent AI Agents across 12 departments executing at light speed. C-level and Manager agents command pods and super-pods of thousands on-demand.
Oceanic
Autonomous Cloud
Hybrid Cloud or On-prem hosting and app framework with redundancy across multiple clouds and selective inference capabilities.
Research Labs
Frontier AI Research
Advancing the state of the art in AI safety, small language models, robotics, sustainable energy, and space systems.
Category Anchors
Industry Platforms
Purpose-built platforms like DiligenceGPT demonstrating infrastructure capabilities across verticals.
Partner Ecosystem
Strategic Partnerships
Collaborating with leading enterprises and governments to deploy autonomous capabilities at scale.
Leadership
Our team brings together expertise from Fortune 50 enterprises, frontier AI research, military systems engineering, and venture capital—united by a vision to build transformative infrastructure.
Chris McGrath
Founder & CEO
Chris McGrath is a serial entrepreneur and enterprise transformation leader with deep expertise in AI, workforce technology, and digital innovation. As Founder and CEO of both...
Anthony Monroy
Co-Founder & CTO
Anthony Monroy is a technology leader specializing in AI safety, robotics, and dual-use systems with experience scaling infrastructure at $100B+ enterprise levels. As Co-Founder...
Tom Schmidt
Chief Strategy Officer
Tom Schmidt is a veteran executive in the global staffing and human capital industry with over 25 years of leadership experience at Fortune 500 workforce companies. As Chief...
Salim Lakhani
Head of Cloud
Salim Lakhani is a cloud infrastructure architect and serial entrepreneur specializing in SaaS, PaaS, and AI platforms with deep expertise in compliance and accessibility. As Head...
Govind Davis
AI Platform Evangelist
Govind Davis is a technology evangelist and solution architect with over 20 years of experience building scalable systems for global enterprises. As AI Platform Evangelist at...
Jimmy Liddar
VP, Client Services
Jimmy Liddar is a seasoned executive and AI strategist with over 20 years of expertise driving digital transformation, client success, and strategic business development. As...
Advisors
Ashley Martis
Advisor, Founder and CEO, Diligence GPT
Ashley Martis is a venture capital technology pioneer and startup ecosystem builder, serving as CEO of DiligenceGPT and Startup Fuel, a Canada-based AI due diligence platform...
Join us in building the future
We're assembling a world-class team of researchers, engineers, and visionaries to tackle the most ambitious challenges at the intersection of AI, robotics, sustainable energy, and space systems.
Work on frontier AI research that shapes the industry
Collaborate with leading experts across multiple disciplines
Build systems that transform how organizations operate
Competitive compensation with meaningful equity
Ready to build your AI Infrastructure with ease?
Request a demo to see how Oceanic can transform your organization's intelligence, orchestration, and deployment capabilities.