About
We tailor models. You keep them.
Kethra is the private-model atelier built by Basis Research, Inc. We started it because a company's most distinctive surface should not be rented from the same shelf as its competitors.
A model of your own
For most of the last few years, building with AI has meant building on a handful of shared base models. It was the fastest way to start, and it quietly made everyone sound the same. The companies that wanted something of their own faced a hard bill: hire a research team, build a data pipeline, stand up an eval suite, and only then ship a private model.
Kethra closes that gap. You bring your data and a written standard. We handle the fine-tuning, the evaluation and the deployment, and we hand you the weights. The craft is ours. The garment is yours. That is the whole company, and it is why we say a model made to measure, yours alone.
We are headquartered in San Francisco and build for teams worldwide. We are deliberately small, deliberately careful, and deliberately in the business of ownership rather than rental.
Four standards of our own
Made to measure
A model should fit the company that wears it. We tailor, we do not sell off the shelf.
Owned, not rented
The weights belong to the customer. We hold the craft, not the garment.
Cleared the bar
Nothing deploys until it beats the base model on an eval built from your own standard.
Quiet by default
Your data trains your model only. Privacy is the setting, not the upsell.
Founders and makers
Rowan Ashby
Co-founder & CEO
Rowan led applied language modelling at a London research lab before Kethra, and spent a decade shipping models into products that could not fail quietly. She started Kethra to give companies a model of their own.
San Francisco, CA
Idris Fen
Co-founder & CTO
Idris built fine-tuning and evaluation infrastructure at scale, and has trained more private models than he can name under NDA. He owns the tailoring pipeline: fit, eval, distil, deploy.
San Francisco, CA
Marielle Voss
Head of ML Research
Marielle works on alignment and evaluation, turning a written standard into a held-out eval a model can be measured against. Her rule: nothing ships until the bar is cleared.
Remote, US
Callum Reyes
Head of Design
Callum shapes how a tailored model feels to work with, from the fitting through to the deployed endpoint. He believes an owned model should feel bespoke, not borrowed.
San Francisco, CA
Registered company
Kethra is a product of Basis Research, Inc., a Delaware corporation headquartered at 631 Brannan Street, Suite 300, San Francisco, CA 94107, United States. Founded 2022, serving teams worldwide. LinkedIn
Want a model of your own?
Book a fitting and we will tailor, evaluate and deploy a private model, owned by you.