Idler, founded in 2025 and based in San Francisco's Dogpatch neighbourhood, builds reinforcement learning environments that teach AI models to code at expert human levels. Backed by Y Combinator and operating without external venture capital, the company designs training environments based on real-world coding scenarios to prepare AI models for complex production challenges.
The company has generated $440K in revenue and secured a landmark multimillion-dollar contract with a leading foundation lab. Its work sits at the intersection of reinforcement learning, AI model training, and coding environments, serving the AI research, foundation models, and software engineering sectors.
Idler is a small but ambitious team that encodes real human expertise into frontier AI systems, operating on the principle that advanced AI should be trained on rigorous, responsibly produced work grounded in real expertise. The company is rapidly expanding to meet demand that currently outpaces its capacity.
