About Us
The Next Thing
“A change of perspective is worth 80 IQ points.”
Alan Kay, inventor of the graphical user interface, first laptop, and a lot more.
Every wave of technology brings a fundamental change of perspective—we are in the middle of one of the most exciting changes right now, the third wave — "Generative AI and the Web 3.0 Semantic Web"
The web was first used to help create websites for users as consumers of content, that lead to web 2.0 where applications moved from desktop to the web and the rise of social platforms. Today, we are at the start of the third wave, an AI–driven, generative, peer-to-peer, direct-to-consumer, communities-driven, decentralized web.
Sage Digital was founded by a team that has helped envision the future from the early days of the Mac launch to helping businesses, builders and developers create 50M+ web sites, 50K+ social and fan sites, manage $1B+ in revenue from Fortune 500 with reaching 500m+ monthly users across the world. We grew enterprise revenue from zero to $100M annually in 6 years.
The Big Idea
Sage AI started as an idea back in 2014—to create a platform designed just for verified experts and businesses that would help power the next generation Verified Expert Identity Applications.
In 2014, while at a meeting back at Apple, Samir asked the question, “what would you do with this idea?” and wham, Eddy Cue’s response instantly hit us as one of the biggest ideas we had heard — “You should build this for experts for their businesses first”
We knew, that this was one of those big idea moments.
In early 2016, to help vet the idea (a crucial step in Silicon Valley seed/early stage startups) with the kind help of Eric Schmidt helped setup time with John Giannandrea with Jason Rosenberg at Google. At the time, JG was running Google AI and Search, and his deep understanding and response helped us move Sage to full development—“Search and AI language models (Google was inventing the transformer / LLMs at that time) use data based on volume and popularity, your idea of building based on expertise is a fundamental pillar that is missing and needed for the web and AI"
Based on his feedback, Sage Digital was founded and we started with a 100 manually nominated experts and businesses, and grew it to 1,000 and starting in 2016, used that data-set to train AI/ML to help us build the first global list of verifed experts.
Below is a post by Jeff Jarvis, about our vision about Next Gen AI-Driven platforms.
Building the Tech Stack
Following this, we started to build the Sage AI platform:
Our Platform Pillars
To truly leap forward, we created our tech pillars:
1. Invest in Deep Technology: Data / Machine Learning for Next–Gen Applications
2. Build a platform for Data Ingestion from multiple sources (structured, semi-structured, unstructured +
3. Build Sage Pipes machines to index large data contexts
4. Build a semantic web of verified global experts
5. Use expertise to build deep knowledge in verticals
The second stage of API and Platform development helped us hone our deep understanding of the Experts web.
Sage AI Platform Now
In late 2021, Sage spun out the AI and Web 3.0 Applications building platform to a new startup called Kyro Digital, and continued its work on Web 3.0 application enablement.
In 2022, some of the early Sage engineers started work on an AI Platform to learn about how public LLMs use proprietary data called Kanza AI
In 2023, a new company Kasso was created to help build the tools for Expert ID, Expert App and Experts Protocol.