Where did Redda come from?
Most of us met running a venture studio — the one Mach49 built to incubate companies for NEOM, with a $100 million annual fund, building AI-centric companies. Atif ran it. Collin, Halli and Jamie worked in it. David and Yosha built a startup that was funded through the incubation.
Then years of forward-deployed engineering across the US and Europe, some of us inside large-scale AI infrastructure companies. We learned the same lesson everywhere: at scale we had to change the approach and build a new set of tools.
After a year of seminars with private equity firms, we kept hearing the same question in every room. Where do I find engineers like yours?
So we expanded the toolset, formalized the approach into the SHIFT Method, and launched Redda AI. Everyone at Redda builds, whether that is adding to the platform, adding to the toolset, or working with your company. The people you meet are the people who do the work.
The name
The word "Redda" is Icelandic. Said RED-a, with the stress on the first half. The verb “að redda” means to fix, to sort out, to find a way through. It comes from “þetta reddast”, which is more or less the national motto, and what Icelanders say when the weather turns or the volcano goes off or the plan falls apart.
It is usually mistaken for a shrug. It is not. It comes from a thousand years of living somewhere that regularly tries to kill you, and it means there is no such thing as a dead end if you are willing to work at it. Worrying, replaced by doing.
That is the part we liked. Every company we meet has something nobody has been able to solve for them, and has been told it is too hard, too early, or too expensive. We think most of it can be sorted out. So we named the company after the word for it.
Oh and our CTO is from Iceland.