Trajectory raises $45 million at $300 million valuation

Trajectory was founded about a year ago by three Stanford classmates with experience at Google DeepMind and Apple. The company aims to solve a common problem: general AI models don't learn from their mistakes without further training, and fine-tuning them for specialized fields often requires hiring internal research teams or expensive forward-deployed engineers (FDEs). Trajectory's approach, called continual learning, lets businesses start with an open source model and connect the platform to their applications, collecting feedback that Trajectory then uses to retrain the model. Co-founder Ronak Malde compared foundational models to a very smart PhD student who's always starting a new job, while what the economy values is someone who worked on the job for 30 years. The startup considers Thinking Machines Lab, Applied Compute, and Prime Intellect as competitors in automating post-training, but Malde believes Trajectory's biggest advantage is its team, which includes researchers from DeepMind, OpenAI, Stripe, and Netflix.