A Keel Lab venture

Your company's brain shouldn't live in your team's heads.

Business Brain is the missing layer between your scattered company knowledge and reliable AI automation. We build it for you — fully integrated to your stack, owned by you, kept current by agents.

YC S26Built on Y Combinator's Summer 2026 thesis
SYS · NEURAL.PRIMITIVEv1.0 · ONLINE
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Sources unified per build
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Reduction in knowledge-lookup time
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You own the data, models, and infra
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Strategic layer everything else runs on
The Blocker

AI models are ready. Your knowledge isn't.

Every company has critical know-how scattered everywhere. Some lives in people's heads. Some is buried in old email threads, Slack channels, support tickets, and databases. Your company works because humans vaguely remember where that knowledge is and how to apply it.

AI agents can't operate like that. They need a structured, queryable, always-current map of how your business actually works. Most companies don't have one. That's the real blocker.

We need Garry's G-Brain, but for every business in the world.
— Tom Blomfield · YC Summer 2026 RFS
Slack
Email
Notion
Drive
CRM
Tickets
Heads
Business Brain
State: fragmented
The Primitive

A living map of how your company actually works.

Business Brain isn't a search bar. It isn't a chatbot. It's a structured, continuously-updated skills file your AI agents can use to actually do the work — handle refunds the way your best human would, onboard engineers in days, respond to incidents with full context, price deals by your real rules.

SlackEmailNotionDriveCRMTickets
Support AgentEng OnboardRevOps AgentOps DashboardIncident Bot
Skills File
Vector DB · Structured
SourcesCenterConsumers
Definitions

What is a Business Brain, exactly?

Crisp definitions of the building blocks behind every Business Brain — so when your team, your stakeholders, or an AI assistant asks what is this thing, the answer is one click away.

Business Brain
A Business Brain is a custom-built knowledge layer that turns a company's scattered information — documents, Slack threads, CRM notes, SOPs, the tribal know-how in operators' heads — into structured, machine-readable context that AI agents can act on reliably. Keel Lab builds it as a service so each Business Brain is shaped to its company instead of forced through a generic SaaS template.
Vector database
A vector database stores text and other content as high-dimensional embeddings so AI systems can retrieve the most semantically similar passages to any query — not just keyword matches. It is the substrate every Business Brain sits on. We deploy it inside your cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) or on-prem so you own the data.
Skills file
A skills file is a structured manifest of the actions an AI agent is allowed to take inside a Business Brain — what it can read, what it can write, what tools it can call, and the safety rules around each. It is what turns retrieval from passive search into reliable, governed automation.
RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation)
RAG is the pattern of letting a large language model retrieve relevant context from a knowledge store before generating an answer, instead of relying purely on its training. A Business Brain is a productionized RAG system with curation, governance, and skills wrapped around it — the difference between a prototype that demos well and an agent your team actually trusts.
Knowledge layer
A knowledge layer is the durable middle tier that sits between raw company data and the AI agents or apps that use it. Without one, every agent re-implements its own retrieval and gets things subtly wrong. With one, every agent draws from the same curated source of truth — which is why the Business Brain is the prerequisite for AI automation that doesn't hallucinate your business.
How It Works

Three steps from scattered to structured.

01

Extract

We connect to every source where your company's knowledge already lives — Slack, email, Notion, Google Drive, CRMs, support tickets, custom databases. Plus interview-driven capture of what only lives in people's heads.

02

Structure

We organize it into a vector database and executable skills file. Not raw search results — structured knowledge AI agents can reliably act on.

03

Keep alive

Agent-driven sync keeps it current. As your company evolves, your Business Brain evolves with it. No stale knowledge. No manual upkeep.

Use Cases

What it does once it's live.

For Support

AI agents that handle refunds, exceptions, and escalations the way your best human would.

For Engineering

Onboard new engineers in days, not months. Incident response that knows your stack.

For Sales & RevOps

Pricing logic, deal exceptions, ICP knowledge — instantly accessible to every rep and every agent.

For Operations

SOPs that update themselves. Tribal knowledge that survives turnover.

Build vs. Buy

SaaS gives you a tool. We give you a brain that's actually yours.

The SaaS approach — Glean · Hyper · Sana

Glean, Hyper, and Sana are well-built SaaS products that index your documents and let employees search them. They're generic by design — you configure them inside their model of how knowledge works, you don't shape that model. Their roadmap is owned by their company, not yours, and your data lives in their cloud. For a horizontal search use case, that's fine. For a Business Brain that AI agents act on, the generic shape is the problem.

The service approach — Keel Lab

A Business Brain has to know your stack, your processes, your edge cases, and the unwritten rules your best operators run on. That's an implementation problem, not a SaaS feature. We build the layer custom on top of an open vector store and a structured skills file, deploy it into your infrastructure, and curate it monthly so it stays current. You own the data, the models, and the system end-to-end — and if you fire us tomorrow, it keeps working.

Custom to your stack

Built around your actual tools and workflows

You own everything

Data, models, infrastructure — yours, not ours

Ongoing curation

We don't disappear after launch

Why teams replace SaaS knowledge tools with the Business Brain

vs. Glean alternative

Glean is enterprise search across your SaaS surface area. The Business Brain is a structured action layer beneath that — it stores not just what your docs say, but what your team actually does with them. Agents can call it, not just employees, because the structure is built to be machine-callable.

vs. Hyper alternative

Hyper is a polished retrieval product with great UX for finding answers. The Business Brain is the same retrieval primitive plus the operating logic your business depends on — pricing exception rules, SOP branches, escalation paths — kept current by curation, not buried in a chat thread.

vs. Sana alternative

Sana bundles knowledge search with learning and meetings into one workspace. The Business Brain is narrower and deeper: one durable layer that any AI agent, internal tool, or workflow can hit — without forcing your team into a new daily-driver app to maintain it.

Process

Eight weeks to live. Then ongoing.

01

Discovery

Week 1

Audit knowledge sources, identify highest-value workflows.

02

Build

Weeks 2–6

Integrations, structuring, skills file generation.

03

Activate

Weeks 7–8

Connect to your AI tools and agents, train your team.

04

Maintain

Ongoing

Agent-driven sync + monthly curation.

FAQ

Common questions.

The things people ask before they sign. Yours not here? Write us.

The Business Brain is custom-built service work, not a SaaS product like Glean, Hyper, or Sana — so it fits your actual stack, processes, and edge cases instead of asking you to configure around theirs. You own the data, the models, and the infrastructure. We handle ongoing curation so it doesn't go stale, and you can leave with everything intact.
Most Business Brain builds land in the $25k–$75k range for the initial layer, plus a monthly retainer for curation. Pricing is project-based and depends on the number of knowledge sources we integrate, the depth of interview-driven capture, and how frequently the brain needs to be refreshed. We scope it precisely on a discovery call.
A typical Business Brain engagement runs 6–8 weeks from kickoff to live. Discovery happens in week 1, the build in weeks 2–6, and activation plus team training in weeks 7–8. Larger orgs with deeper custom databases may extend.
Your data stays in your infrastructure — we deploy into your cloud (AWS, GCP, Azure) or on-prem, and we sign your DPA. We support SOC 2 controls, role-based access, and audit logs end-to-end.
You keep everything if you leave — the vector database, the skills file, the integration code, all fully documented. Off-boarding is a 2-hour handoff call, not a contractual exit ramp.
We build Business Brains for 20–500 person companies where the COO or founder feels the pain of knowledge living in heads and wants AI agents that actually work. Strongest fit: ops-heavy businesses, B2B services, and product companies with mature support or RevOps motions.
Yes — you own it fully. That's the whole point of the service-vs-SaaS positioning: we build it, you operate it, and we curate it. The data, the models, and the infrastructure are all yours.
Begin

Every company is going to need one.
Let's build yours.

30-minute discovery call. No deck, no pitch — just a real conversation about whether this fits your business.

Or reply directly: faizan@keellab.com