Tolan

very cool to see Portola talk about their voice model w OpenAI https://lnkd.in/ggpUVqku (oh and they're hiring - link in comments)

Brian is amongst the best in the business and so is the Portola team. We wrote about our technical collaboration -- highly recommend reading this if you are building personalized AI systems!

Cached prompts don't work for voice. Users change subjects constantly, and if you're not rebuilding context from scratch each turn, you get drift. We've been working closely with OpenAI over the past year to solve this at Portola, with a focus on memory compression, sub-50ms vector retrieval, and character systems that stay consistent across long conversations. OpenAI just published a deep dive about the architecture and why GPT-5.1's steerability was a turning point for Tolan. If this work sounds interesting... we're hiring :) send me a note: quinten@portola.ai https://lnkd.in/gVp4mRp3

What does it mean to build an AI companion? The first thing we discovered is it’s not the same as building other kinds of agents, like helpdesk AIs, booking bots, and the like. The fluidity of the human-computer interaction must be on a whole different level. Tolan must never forget your spouse’s name, talk over you, or go on random tangents. And Tolan must always respond extremely quickly while bringing the ambient understanding of the world that you’d expect from a real person. To bring this to life, we've leaned on key partners like OpenAI. Around their frontier models we’ve layered on sophisticated context management, memory, and voice systems. We've worked together to document our approach: https://lnkd.in/gPx9PgWN Some places we've made big investments: • We rehydrate the context window on every turn and have gpt5.1-mini-powered monitor prompts that dynamically alter the agent’s behavior in response to how the conversation is unfolding. • At both memory generation and recall time we synthesize a variety of queries, maximizing lookup hit rate. • When compressing memories we use kNN + text-embedding-3 vectors to collocate relevant content while keeping context window sizes manageable. Our prompts output diffs rather than full snapshots for efficiency. • Our memory system leverages turbopuffer which brings our embeddings out of cold object storage into NVMe for blazing fast ANN lookups. • We lean on LiveKit for fast turns, specifically leveraging their CPU-friendly EOU model and turn detection module. The result is something that frankly only existed in science fiction until very recently. Tolan’s 200k+ active users are a testament to that. And we're only just getting started. Portola is defining the future of human <> computer interaction. Want to help? Drop me a line: evan@portola.ai

Three-quarters of this year's Future 50 operate with fewer than 50 employees. Yet they're achieving remarkable scale: - Helius processes 20 billion requests daily with 29 people - David AI hit "8-figure" revenue with 20 people - Noble has processed $18B with 15 people - Portola has hit $12M revenue with 20 people The best companies today have incredible leverage. Full list of 50 companies: https://lnkd.in/e9EhZavj

𝐒𝐍𝐄𝐀𝐊 𝐏𝐄𝐀𝐊: check out 6/10 of the inflecting founders you'll meet at our October Showcase 👀 𝗔𝗽𝗽𝗹𝘆 𝗻𝗼𝘄 at foundersysk.com for your chance to meet them & hear why you should join their team. We're excited to feature the following founders at our October 15th Founders You Should Know startup showcase: Soham Mazumdar, founder of WisdomAI Justin Lopas, founder of Base Power Company Quinten Farmer, founder of Portola Nicolas Kopp, founder of Rillet Jeremy Gurewitz, founder of Solace Jeffrey Wang, founder of Exa + 4 more breakout founders... Huge thank you to our co-hosts at Radical Ventures and Rippling for bringing this event to life with us! These founders are backed by investors and accelerators like Andreessen Horowitz, Lightspeed, Thrive Capital, Khosla Ventures, Sequoia Capital, Menlo Ventures & more A huge thank you to our community members who nominated these founders: Aditya Naganath, Jared Rosner, Lachy Groom, Joshua Fang, Reginald J. Williams, C.C. Gong, Mike DeFeo