
Founded by Adam AlSayyad & Haluk Cem Demirhan
They are best friends from UC Berkeley who were working on different research problems around agents systems and reliability. Over time they realized both of their work was pointing to the same underlying issue, and almost everyone deploying agents would have the same problem. They gave up their return offers and paused PhD paths to build Cascade.

Haluk previously built production monitoring infrastructure and scaled agent systems at companies like Netflix and Amazon. His research at BAIR Lab covered long-horizon memory optimization and failure mode taxonomies for AI agents. Haluk studied Computer Science and Mathematics at UC Berkeley.
Adam previously conducted research at BAIR Lab, where his work focused on graph reasoning models, and agentic safety under some of the world's leading ML and AI safety researchers. He studied Computer Science at UC Berkeley.
Right now organizations deploy generalist agents into custom processes. An agent that preforms well on benchmarks might fail terribly in production. Teams understand these pains:
Teams inspect logs, tweak prompts, and write rubrics but they’re mostly guessing. As a result they can’t deploy agents where they matter most.
Cascade treats agent execution as data.
They observe real production runs and train evaluator models that learn what correct behavior looks like inside a company’s workflows. They analyze reasoning steps, tool usage, and outcomes to detect failure modes, threats, and reliability issues automatically.
Those evaluations are then converted into structured feedback that can improve rubrics, prompts, and models.