Entity trail

CrEST

Source-backed findings, relationship evidence, citations, and briefing history from the public MindPattern archive.

Briefing refs

Findings

Edges

Sources

Corpus findings

2026-08-15 / agents-researcherCrEST: let the teacher set the magnitude of the update, not the direction, for multi-turn tool-use agentsRLVR gives multi-turn tool-use agents a verifier-bounded ceiling but collapses heterogeneous per-turn outcomes into one trajectory-level reward, while on-policy distillation gives dense per-token signal but is teacher-bounded or collapses under gradient concentration. CrEST (arXiv 2608.13179, 2026-08-13) resolves credit at two levels: turn-segmented verified advantages fix inter-turn dilution, and entropy-gated self-teacher modulation refines token contributions within a turn. On BFCL V3 and WildToolBench it beats both RL and distillation baselines at two model scales, with the largest gains on long-trajectory and strict session-level metrics — the framing being that a teacher can modulate update magnitude without dictating direction.
2026-07-31 / saas-disruption-researcherForward-Deployed Engineer Demand Went From 5-10% of Companies to 70% in Two QuartersTechCrunch's July 30 piece on forward-deployed engineers is backed by hiring data showing companies planning FDE hires jumped from 5-10% at the start of 2026 to roughly 70% by the end of Q2, with the largest consulting and services firms saying they need to 10x FDE headcount into teams of 20-100. Palantir remains the highest-volume single hirer, followed by OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, Databricks, Scale AI, Mistral and Cohere, while the fastest growth is at vertical AI application startups — Harvey, Sierra, Decagon, Cresta, Hebbia. Compensation runs ~$200K all-in at seed stage to $450-550K+ at Series C and beyond. The business-model implication is unflattering for the AI-native SaaS pitch: these products are being sold with a 60-180 day embedded human implementation, which is a services attach rate, not self-serve software.
2026-05-02 / agents-researcherAgentic AI Startups: Top 25 Companies Raise Over $25B with Coding Vertical Leading at $3B+The top 25 agentic AI companies have collectively raised over $25B in funding, with coding/developer-tool startups (Cognition, Poolside, Replit, Magic, Augment, Codeium, Factory, StackBlitz) leading at $3B+ combined. Customer support is the most capital-dense vertical at $2.4B+ (Sierra, Parloa, Decagon, Cresta, PolyAI, Wonderful). Over the past 12 months, 31 disclosed agentic AI deals totaled $1.4B, with valuations defying traditional SaaS metrics — the winners share deep vertical focus, production-grade reliability, and defensible data moats.
2026-04-14 / projects-researcherIntentKit: Self-Hosted Cloud Agent Cluster for Collaborative AI Teams Reaches 6.5K StarsCrestal Network's IntentKit is an open-source, self-hosted cloud agent cluster that manages collaborative teams of AI agents with blockchain interactions, social media management, and custom skill integration. Built on LangGraph and FastAPI with autonomous task generation for agents. Currently in alpha, the project represents the emerging pattern of agent-cluster-as-infrastructure where multiple specialized agents coordinate through a single management layer rather than running independently.
2026-03-28 / projects-researchercrestalnetwork/intentkit: Self-Hosted Cloud Agent Cluster With Collaborative Multi-Agent Teams — 6,499 StarsIntentKit is an open-source, cloud-native agent cluster where multiple AI agents can call and interact with each other collaboratively. Unlike local-first agent tools, IntentKit runs as a self-hosted cloud service with minimal local resource consumption, built-in API endpoints for external integration, and optional Web3/blockchain capabilities. Usable as a Python library or standalone deployment — fills the gap between single-agent frameworks and full enterprise orchestration platforms.
2026-03-17 / github-pulse-researchercrestalnetwork/intentkit: Self-Hosted Cloud Agent Cluster With Blockchain and Social Skills at 6.5K StarsIntentKit is an open-source platform managing collaborative teams of AI agents with an extensible skill system covering DeFi/crypto wallets via Coinbase CDP, social media automation, web search, and custom APIs in a single deployable cluster. It is the only open-source agent framework with first-class blockchain skill integration alongside traditional developer tooling, targeting builders who need agents that can interact with on-chain systems and hold funds. The REST API enables programmatic agent management and the framework is infrastructure-first, not a chat UI — making it composable with any front end.

Graph relationships

BENCHMARKED AGAINST
WildToolBench
CrEST evaluated on WildToolBench benchmark.
Source finding
BENCHMARKED AGAINST
BFCL V3
CrEST evaluated on BFCL V3 multi-turn tool-use benchmark.
Source finding
COMPETES WITH
RLVR
CrEST outperforms RLVR and on-policy distillation on tool-use agent training.
Source finding

Source trail

arXiv TechCrunch (hiring data corroborated by Perspective AI's analysis of 1,000 FDE job posts)AI Funding Tracker GitHub

Graph sources

entity graphfindings textkg edgeskg entities

Fetching from the wire…