That headline is a lie in three acts. “Secretive” is laughable when the company has a website and LinkedIn breadcrumbs. “Backed by Concur co-founders” is just name-dropping without a dollar attached. “Rethink customer experience software” is empty perfume, not a claim.
Publisher: GeekWire
That headline is a lie in three acts. “Secretive” is laughable when the company has a website and LinkedIn breadcrumbs. “Backed by Concur co-founders” is just name-dropping without a dollar attached. “Rethink customer experience software” is empty perfume, not a claim.
What follows isn’t reporting, it’s a press release polished by a caffeinated SEO intern. Taylor Soper delivers emotional fan fiction for founders, complete with breathless affirmations and zero tolerance for basic scrutiny. GeekWire’s editors read like gullible aesthetes who fetishize “transformative” and “agentic” until the words evaporate. They even skip the one detail PR flacks always cram in, the Pantone color, which tells you how faithfully they’re transcribing the pitch deck. It treats founder pedigree as proof and waves away the missing evidence with adjectives. The tone is pure triggered groupie, not a reporter with a spine.
Where are the artifacts that matter? No product you can touch. No demo. No customers or pilots. No funding totals. No technical architecture, data plan, or even the pretense of security and compliance. It’s all credential worship and vibes.
The “agentic AI for regulated industries” shtick is the loudest red flag. Healthcare and finance don’t buy slogans. They buy audit trails, determinism under constraints, provenance, human-in-the-loop guarantees, breach response, and actual certifications. Show me how actions are constrained and logged, how PHI or financial data is handled, what models are used and why, and how you keep the thing from going off the rails. Instead we get linen-wrapped buzzwords. SCALA smells like a rebranded chatbot in a nicer suit.
Wake me when there’s a real demo, a customer willing to be named in public, a compliance story that survives a lawyer, and code with commits that aren’t staged theater. Until then, file this under PR cosplay and stop pretending it’s news.
