---
title: "Launching Honcho: The Personal Identity Platform for AI"
subtitle: Plastic raises $5.4M pre-seed from Variant, White Star Capital, & Betaworks to build critical AI infrastructure
date: 05.10.25
tags:
  - announcements
  - honcho
  - fundraising
  - dev
  - philosophy
author: Courtland Leer
description: Plastic Labs announces $5.4M pre-seed funding & launches Honcho as the personal identity platform for individually-aligned AI agents & applications.
---
# TL;DR
*We're announcing two major milestones for Plastic Labs:*

1. **Honcho as a hosted platform.** 

	*We're granting early access to power personal context management for AI agents & applications starting today!*
	
	*Honcho is now a simple, complete, hosted solution for adaptive agent memory, social cognition, & personalization.*

2. **Our pre-seed raise of $5.4M to solve personal identity for the agentic world.**
# Individual Alignment
Most AI products focus on being palatable to the average user. This neglects the potential for personalization their generative nature affords. It limits the scope of personally useful behaviors and results in poor UX, high churn, and handicapped abilities.

AI systems need mechanisms to understand each of us on an individual level. They need methods for cohering to our psychology and personality. They need social cognition to eliminate cold starts and build long-term relationships.

They need Honcho.
# Honcho Platform Early Access
Today we're launching early access to the hosted [Honcho](https://honcho.dev) platform.

It's the most powerful personal identity and social cognition solution for AI apps and agents.

Honcho is a cloud-based API that enables more personalized and contextually aware user experiences. It simplifies the process of maintaining context across conversations and interactions, allowing developers to create more responsive and customized agents without managing complex infrastructure.

Honcho combines flexible memory, [[ARCHIVED; Theory of Mind Is All You Need|theory of mind]] inference, self-improving user representations, and a [[ARCHIVED; Introducing Honcho's Dialectic API|dialectic API]] to get your application the context it needs about each user for every inference.

All this happens ambiently, with no additional overhead to your users--no surveys, no hard coded questions, no BYO data requirements needed to get started. Honcho learns about each of your users in the background as they interact with your application.

When your agent needs information about a user, it simply asks and Honcho responds with the right personal context--in natural language--which can be injected into any part of your architecture.

Context from Honcho is far richer than simply retrieving over session data or cramming it into the context window because Honcho is always running theory of mind inference over that organic data. It's expert at deriving everything there is to infer about a user from their inputs.

The result is a living, thinking reservoir of synthetic data about each user. Honcho gets to the bottom of up-to-date user preferences, history, psychology, personality, values, beliefs, and desires. It maps personal identity. This creates a self-improving representation of each user that transcends the raw data in information density and furnishes much more robust and useful context to your app when it needs it.

To put it simply, this creates magical experiences for users that they don't even know to expect from AI applications. Honcho-powered agents retain state, adapt over time, build relationships, and evolve with their users.

That's why Honcho needed to be built. It's memory infrastructure that goes way deeper than anything else on offer. Theory of mind and identity mapping are tasks to optimize for, requiring serious machine learning, expertise in the cognitive sciences, and AI-native solutions.

If you want to deliver best-in-class personalization, memory, time-to-value, trust, and unlock truly novel experiences to your users, we want to work with you. 

We're giving early access to teams & developers today.

[Get started now](https://honcho.dev).
# A Personal Identity Layer for AI
^d958ce
The release of Honcho as a platform is just the start, the next step is Honcho as a network.

An engine for social cognition and deeply grokking personal identity is a game changing tool for AI apps, but owning your personal Honcho representation and taking it with you to every agent in your growing stack is world changing.

It's what's required to truly realize Plastic's mission to decentralize alignment--to give every human access to personally aligned, scalable intelligence.

So we're building a network--a data layer--through which Honcho representations can be shared among all your AI applications.

The Honcho network will allow what's learned about a user in one application to be used to deliver superior experience in another. By aggregating context from myriad agents and settings, Honcho representations can become so high-fidelity as to asymptotically approach the real-time complexity of each user's actual personal identity. 

We believe this will unlock profoundly new kinds of AI products and experiences. Every agent in the network can be just-in-time personalized, personal context can be used fluidly between agents, marketplaces can emerge, and *critically*, users can be empowered with sovereign control and ownership of their representations.

This vision stands in clear opposition to legacy approaches to user data, but in the latent agentic economy, has clear advantages. For users, using Honcho will mean that their personal data is at once more secure *and* enables remarkably better services. And for business, provides a positive-sum alternative to web2's history of feudal data governance, allowing them to punch above their weight relative to massive walled gardens.

Honcho will be critical AI infrastructure--enabling individual agency to scale and radical innovation from open-source to startup to enterprise, from vibe coders to fully autonomous systems.
# Our Pre-Seed Round
The final announcement today is Plastic's $5.4M pre-seed round, led by [Variant](https://variant.fund/), [White Star Capital](https://whitestarcapital.com/), and [Betaworks](https://www.betaworks.com/).

The round also includes participation from [Mozilla Ventures](https://mozilla.vc/), [Seed Club Ventures](https://www.seedclub.xyz/getfunded/ventures), [Greycroft](https://www.greycroft.com/), and [Differential Ventures](https://www.differential.vc/), along with angels like [Scott Moore](https://x.com/notscottmoore), [NiMA Asghari](https://x.com/ywayisaway), and [Thomas Howell](https://x.com/seethomasowl).

It's a group of deeply aligned investors who share our vision of a more personalized and decentralized AI future.

Funds will be deployed directly toward the talent, growth, and compute required to realize the full vision of Honcho.

We're just getting started.
# Plastic's Mission
Plastic's mission is to radically decentralize alignment. Your AI should be an extension of you. You should dictate how it's aligned. And you should own the data used to do it.

Most LLM applications are still optimizing for homogenization, if not outright determinism. They're trained or prompted to behave according to a set of standards and values that you don't have participation in. 

They're aligned centrally, top-down.

But as we use AI for ever more cognitive and agentic tasks, this situation becomes fundamentally untenable, if not unacceptable. Imagine your notebook manufacturer engineered it such that it refused to store memories. Or if it took ownership of those memories? What if your word processor didn't approve of your style, or the ideas you need to explore?

That would be ridiculous. Paternalistic. Limiting.

When you come to depend on a piece of technology, it becomes an extension of your personal identity. We shouldn't tolerate unaligned appendages, but this is the current situation in AI. And it leads to a chronic lack of trust we must overcome to unlock the real potential.

Instead of imposing opaque alignment schemes, we should be subverting the problem and working in the opposite direction--vesting everyone with the liberty and technology to align their artificially intelligent augments as they see fit.

If you want work [IRL in NYC](https://www.therefineryatdomino.com/) on the most impactful and important work in artificial intelligence, we're hiring for four more roles immediately:

- [[Founding ML Engineer]] - Shape the future of AI at Plastic, tackle challenges across the ML stack, train cutting edge theory of mind models

- [[Platform Engineer]] - Build & scale Honcho's infrastructure, define performance & security for the future of AI personalization

- [[Full-Stack Engineer]] - Design Honcho's user facing applications, iterate rapidly on creative, exceptional user experiences

- [[Summer Internships]] - Work on real AI products with customers eager to use them, accelerate the team across full stack, machine learning, and platform engineering roles

Get in touch! 

Let's build 🥽.