A small lab
doing big things.
Blacksky Labs is an indie AI studio — the kind of place where curiosity leads and polish follows. We're a small, focused team building in the open, iterating fast, and shipping things that actually work.
We don't have a corporate agenda. We have a genuine interest in what AI can do when it's applied carefully — to civic accountability, creative expression, novel interfaces, and the edges where things get interesting.
We build at the
edges of things.
AI beyond the obvious. We're interested in the parts of the field that aren't crowded — swarm intelligence without neural networks, generation pipelines that think before they paint, retrieval systems that actually retrieve what matters. The common thread is treating AI as a craft, not a checklist.
Technology in service of accountability. Government data is technically public and practically buried. We build tools that pull it into the open — voting records, ideology scores, money trails — and put them where ordinary people can use them, free.
Tools for making, by people who like making things. We build for artists, builders, and anyone bringing something into the world that wasn't there before. Aesthetics-first, control-forward — the goal is creative agency, not a roll of the dice.
I am because
we are.
Ubuntu reframes the question. Most product thinking starts with what does the user want? Ubuntu starts with who is the user a part of? That's not a small move. It changes who gets considered first. It changes what counts as success. It changes which trade-offs are acceptable when the easy ones cost someone you'll never meet.
Every product we build starts with the same question: who's underserved by the current version of this technology? The communities that need AI most — civic, creative, educational, the everyday people who never see themselves in a demo — are the ones we build for first. Not a phase-two roadmap item. The first cut. The shape of AI is being decided right now, and the rooms making those decisions don't look like the world the tools will land in. We don't think the answer is exclusion in reverse. We think the answer is showing up early and building thoughtfully.
That changes how we work, too. Free tiers aren't a marketing ploy here — they're a baseline. Open source where we can. Documentation we'd actually want to read. Support that treats people like they're owed an explanation, not a ticket number. It's a slower way to build, and a less marketable one. We measure by how long the work lasts, not how loudly it launches. The pace might disappoint a VC. This isn't their lab.
Edge in, not center out
The strongest tools come from the strangest places. Most AI right now is built for the same audience by the same people, and the result is a stack that's brilliant at one demo and useless to most of the world. We start at the margins on purpose. The communities that need AI most rarely have a seat at the table where AI is being designed. We build with them in mind first, because the work is sturdier when it has to hold up there before it ever needs to hold up anywhere else.
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WhoIsOurGov Civic transparency built for citizens, not lobbyists. 587 members of Congress with ideology scores, voting records, and media tracking — free to anyone, no paywall, no enterprise tier.
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BlackskyUp A free AI apprenticeship for people who can't afford bootcamps. Real tools, real projects, and a live deployed chatbot as the capstone.
Craft is respect
It's tempting to ship fast and iterate. We do the opposite. Every product we put our name on gets the same care we'd want if we were on the receiving end. RAG that actually retrieves what's relevant. Generation pipelines that don't fight the user. Support that explains the answer instead of escalating the ticket. Polish isn't the goal — the goal is that someone using our work feels like the people who built it took them seriously.
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Maurice Production RAG infrastructure — Llama 3.1 70B, Pinecone, streaming responses, lead scoring, persistent memory — usually reserved for enterprise, priced so a small business can actually run it.
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Symphony A two-stage "think before paint" image pipeline that gives artists actual creative control. Director mode for 3D blocking, depth-mapped diffusion, reproducible outputs. Not a prompt lottery.
Slow on purpose
AI moves fast. The work that lasts moves slow. We don't chase trends. We don't ship a thing because it'd be a good launch. We build things we want to live with, because the people using them will, too. The pace looks underpowered next to the news cycle and right next to a portfolio that's still standing in five years.
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SlimeHive Swarm intelligence built without neural networks. Emergent behavior from natural learning mechanisms — a different bet on what intelligence can look like, made because the question was worth asking.
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Blacksky Radio Independent music platform — curated, artist-owned, not algorithmic. A home for music that deserves to exist outside the recommendation engine.