Ashley Maguire
Founder & CEO- Owns
- Product, design, and go-to-market. She was a software engineer, then a designer.
- Before Helen's Foundry
- Dragos, Descartes Labs, Sandia, General Dynamics
Who's building Helen's Foundry.
A two-person founding team in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
Justin Poehnelt
Founder & CTO- Owns
- Helen's verification engine and agent integrations.
- Before Helen's Foundry
- Google, Descartes Labs, USGS
We run Helen on our own company.
In October we shut down a project that no longer fit our plans. Several pieces of work under it were still open, and anyone could have picked them up. Helen flagged each one and asked the same question: does this still have a reason to exist? We went through every one and decided.
The company.
Helen's Foundry, Inc. Pre-seed.
We met at Descartes Labs, the satellite imagery company that spun out of Los Alamos. It brought in eight figures of revenue and never settled the question people inside called the Descartes Labs Dialectic: was it a software company or a high-end consulting firm? The revenue kept pointing to consulting. The board had paid SaaS multiples, and its model assumed SaaS growth. Both answers lived in the company for years, and nobody made the call. Growth targets built on the SaaS answer filled the gap. In January 2020 the board replaced the founding CEO. In 2022 a company that had raised close to $100 million sold to a private equity firm. Mark Johnson, that CEO, wrote the requiem himself. We lived most of what he describes.