A New Pathway for Applied AI Research
We are driving multidisciplinary applied research to explore and redefine the frontiers of AI.
Why We Exist
Maincode was created for people who still feel the edge of their own curiosity, and want the freedom to explore it. For researchers and engineers who’ve spent time inside the best institutions, only to find that the deeper they go, the narrower the questions become.
We’re building a new kind of AI company. One that’s focused on human reasoning, not just token prediction. One that isn’t here to optimize cloud usage or ad targeting. One that believes the next wave of AI breakthroughs will come not from scale, but from insight, from systems that think with us, not for us.
What We Do
Our focus is on building what we call augmented decision systems. These are tools designed to support human thinking in high-dimensional, high-stakes environments. Systems that reduce cognitive friction, that help people reason through complexity, simulate better strategies, and make confident, grounded decisions. This isn’t about wrapping another API around a language model. It’s about designing intelligence that understands human goals, adapts to human workflows, and stays in the loop as a co-processor for the mind.
Our Structure
We organize around a principle we call the Polymath-Human Collider. It’s not a metaphor, it’s the structure that underpins everything we do.
We bring together researchers, engineers, designers, and domain experts into high-agency teams. There are no silos, no handoffs, no rigid distinctions between thinking and building. Everyone ships. Everyone learns. Everyone contributes to the discovery of truly novel capabilities at the frontier of applied intelligence.
What Makes Us Different
Maincode isn’t a lab, it isn’t a traditional startup, and it’s not trying to be the next OpenAI. We’re a research company that builds products. We’re a product company that publishes research. We move fast, but we do it with care. We think deeply, but we ship often. We’re not trying to scale everything, we’re trying to scale what matters.
We don’t believe in centralising talent behind branding or bureaucracy. We believe that when you give the right people the right space, and the right collaborators, you uncover things no one else can see.
Who We Are Looking For
We’re looking for people with range. People who’ve been trained in neuroscience, robotics, cognition, physics, or design, but don’t want to live in a box defined by their degree. Maybe you’ve been at a frontier lab and felt your curiosity dulled by internal politics. Maybe you’ve built a company before, and now want to focus on pure exploration. Maybe you’ve always felt like your best work happens in the space between disciplines. Wherever you’re coming from, what matters is that you care, about the problem, about the team, and about the work.
We’re not looking for the finished product. We’re looking for the signal, the voltage, the ability to see what others miss and the drive to turn that vision into something real.
How We Work
We work in small, integrated research pods, each made up of engineers, scientists, and designers. We use take-home projects to understand how your curiosity expresses itself in code and prototypes. We believe in full trust, high bandwidth, and low bureaucracy.
We’re a global-first team with founding members in Melbourne, New York, and Cambridge. If a city has thinkers and builders we believe in, we’ll set up a home there. And once a year, we bring the whole company together for an in-person research jam, a space to share, collide, and re-align.
We don’t separate research from product. We treat real-world application as a constraint from day one. The best ideas live at the intersection of theory and use, and we build to find them.
This Isn’t A Job
At Maincode, we believe the future of AI represents a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, not just to use technology, but to discover capabilities the world has not yet imagined. We cannot match Big Tech salaries, and we do not intend to. What we offer is rarer: the freedom to invent before the world knows what it needs, and the chance to help build systems that will outlast any single product cycle.
The first 30 people to join Maincode will not be employees. They will be founders of a new field, with deep autonomy, real ownership, and a level of impact not possible inside larger, slower organisations. We know not everyone is seeking that path. Some want scale and certainty. Others want ownership, invention, and the chance to shape what comes next.
We are building for the latter. If you are drawn to answering the toughest questions at the frontier of AI, with full agency over your work and a real stake in the future, we invite you to build it with us.
Let’s Talk
If you’re looking for a place where you can keep working on the thing you’re most passionate about, while collaborating with people who push your thinking and stretch your imagination, we’d love to talk. This isn’t the safest path, but it might be the most important. And it’s wide open.
Ready to explore the frontier of AI research? Learn more about our mission and what drives us forward.