When Peter, Gabe and Dima founded this company, we named it Canaery — after the canary in the coal mine, the original biological early warning system.
It was a good name. It captured exactly what we were building: living sensors that detect invisible chemical threats before they become visible disasters.
It was also clever. "Can" shared the same root as "canine" and "aer" signaled the air and vapor in which we were working.
"Can-aer-y."
For the first phase of the company, that was sufficient. We were building the interface between trained detection animals and structured data.
But now we are changing it because the mission outgrew the metaphor.
In 2021, ChatGPT had not come out yet. It was an uphill battle to explain to what AI could do if it understood a few thousand words right out of the box. In 2026, the questions are what can't it do?
The vast majority of English-speakers only need to know 1% of the English language to understand 99% of everything that has ever been written. This is because they have the reasoning ability to understand patterns, context clues, etc.
With sensing, it became clear to us that we weren't just able to detect a dozen targets, but rather tens of thousands of compounds -- both biological and chemical.
With tens of thousands of compounds ubiquitously and continuously sensed, we can understand combinations, or "signatures," of the physical world.
OpenAI, NVIDIA, and Meta are investing billions in embodied AI — robots, spatial reasoning, physical world models. Now, we have AMI, World Labs, etc.
Every one of these systems will need chemical awareness, the molecular sensing layer that we are building.
The name works on two levels.
General reflects the thesis. General intelligence — the kind the entire AI industry is racing toward — will need general sensory awareness.
Today's Large Language Models (LLMs) reason over text and images, but it is becoming clearer that true embodied intelligence cannot be achieved by translating the physical world through language first. As poetry often reminds us, some things are just ineffable.
We are building that access to generalized sensory intelligence, one that can achieve true reasoning of the chemical layer of reality.
"General" is also an ode to General Atomics, General Motors, General Dynamics, etc. These were the primes of the industry.
Sense is literal. We decode sense data. Olfactory neural signals. Volatile organic compound (VOC) signatures. Molecular telemetry from biological systems operating at the limit of detection. This is in direct opposition to the perception data that others are collecting (either canine perception or human perception).
Together, the name scales across every phase of the company: detection hardware today, analytics platforms tomorrow, sensory foundation models after that.
The team, the technology, the mission, and every commitment we have made to our customers and investors remain unchanged. We are still building the sensing infrastructure for the molecular layer of the physical world.
We are still the only company capturing structured chemical intelligence data from biological olfaction at this fidelity.
