ORIENT — FOUNDERS
Built from two sides of the same problem.
Jay has spent his career building intelligence systems. Mikael has spent his career building organisations around technological change. Orient emerged from the intersection of those two trajectories: deep technical work on intelligence, state and judgement, combined with the experience required to turn new technology into an enduring company.
FOUNDER 01
Mikael Larsson
Founder & CEO
[ ROLE AT ORIENT ]
Mikael is the founder and CEO of Orient.
He experienced the organisational problem behind Orient first-hand: companies have become extraordinarily good at producing and distributing information, but remain surprisingly poor at creating shared understanding.
AI makes that problem much larger. Information no longer moves only between people. It increasingly moves through models, agents and systems that interpret information and act on behalf of the organisation.
Mikael’s role is to turn that insight into a company and a category: shape the vision and positioning with Jay, build the organisation, work with customers to identify where Orient creates the greatest value, and lead the company through validation, financing and scale.
His focus is making Orient not only important technology, but an important company.
[ THESIS ]
I build companies around shifts in how organisations work, learn and make decisions.
For more than twenty years, Mikael has worked at the intersection of technology, people and business.
Across those companies, the recurring pattern has been the same: technology changes faster than organisations know how to absorb it.
The opportunity is rarely simply to introduce another tool. It is to rethink how the organisation works around it.
AI makes that challenge fundamental.
We are giving machines an increasing role in interpreting information, making recommendations and taking action, while the context, reasoning and understanding they require remains fragmented across people and systems.
The next generation of organisations will need infrastructure not only for information and intelligence, but for shared understanding.
That is what we are building at Orient.
[ TRAJECTORY ]
01
20+ years building and leading companies across technology, SaaS, digital media and professional services
02
Co-founder and former CEO, Learnster
03
Built Learnster from idea through product development, fundraising, organisation building and commercial scale
04
Managing Director, DigitasLBi Stockholm
05
Founder & CEO, Generate
06
Commercial and digital leadership roles at Expressen and TV4
07
Early internet economy experience at DoubleClick
08
Built companies, teams and commercial organisations from 0→1 through growth
09
Raised external capital and worked with institutional and strategic investors
10
Career focused on technological change, organisational behaviour and company building
FOUNDER 02
Jay Solomon
Founder · Product, Intelligence & Research
[ ROLE AT ORIENT ]
Jay conceived Orient from first principles: the thesis, brand, organisational model, product architecture and first working system.
His focus at Orient is to define and establish the intelligence layer beneath the company — the Organisational State Model, the reasoning and judgement systems that maintain it, and the product through which humans and machines use that shared state.
He works at the point where research becomes product: turning difficult questions about state, evidence, uncertainty, reasoning and change into systems that can operate reliably inside real organisations.
A central part of that role is making those ideas durable beyond any individual builder: codifying the model, evaluation methods, architecture and product principles into capabilities the company and its technical organisation can continue to develop.
[ THESIS ]
I build systems that decide what to believe when the evidence is incomplete, contradictory and changing.
For most of my career, the underlying problem has been the same in different forms.
Complex systems rarely fail because they have no information. They fail because information arrives from different sources, at different times, with different levels of reliability — and someone still has to decide what is true enough to act on.
AI makes that problem much larger.
Models can reason. Agents can act. But neither automatically knows which version of reality should govern the next decision.
Orient applies that problem to organisations.
It maintains a grounded organisational state: what is currently believed, what evidence supports it, what has been decided, what conflicts, what remains uncertain and how that understanding changed over time.
The intelligence problem is therefore not simply retrieval or reasoning.
It is judgement:
Given what we believed before and what we have just learned, what should change — and what should not?
That is the intelligence layer Orient is being built to own.
[ BROADER RESEARCH ]
The same problem, at different scales.
Jay’s broader work spans several ventures exploring a recurring question: how can intelligent systems form useful models of worlds that are changing faster than any static representation can keep up?
Alongside organisational state, he is developing solvability models that reason about what becomes possible next across science, technology and industry, and geopolitical state models designed to detect meaningful change across fast-moving real-world systems.
The ventures differ in domain. The underlying problem is the same:
Form state, reason over change, make judgement explicit, and update the model when reality moves.
[ TRAJECTORY ]
01
Mathematical Tripos, Cambridge; advanced studies in signal processing
02
Advanced AI, language, vision, high-performance computing and cryptography in UK Government
03
Founder of three AI companies spanning research and commercial systems
04
Built and led AI systems across intelligence, security, optimisation and decision-making
05
AI leadership and later advisory work at Northvolt; led AI at Disney, Walmart and H&M
06
20+ years working across machine intelligence, complex systems and 0→1 product development
07
Conceived, designed and built the first working version of Orient