Egoist Machines

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About Egoist Machines

YC company profile

Your personal context, securely portable across every AI app.

Egoist Machines is building infrastructure for a world where your personal context belongs to you, rather than to the apps and AI companies you use. Today, every assistant and consumer app builds its own version of you. We think that architecture is backwards. Your context should live with you, persist across products, and be available to any model, app or agent you choose.

AI Passport is the first layer of that infrastructure. It brings the context you generate across AI assistants and everyday apps into one portable profile you control. Tell ChatGPT something and Claude can already know it, for example. Switch to a new product and it can understand you from the first interaction, without the new company needing to own the underlying data.

Apps integrate through Sign in with AI Passport, requesting only the context they need for a specific purpose and duration. Users can see what is being accessed and revoke that access later. Underneath, we have built our own memory infrastructure for fast, compact per-user retrieval and permissioned access.

We are distributing AI Passport directly to consumers through first-party products, while integrating it into consumer applications with existing distribution. Every new product that uses Passport gives users another reason to maintain their context there, and every additional Passport holder makes the context layer more useful to developers.

The next step is to build a true Egoist Machine: an intelligent system whose memory, incentives and actions are governed by the individual it represents. We call it Digital Domovoy, the hardware extension of AI Passport. Instead of your most personal context ultimately living on somebody else's servers, it lives and is processed locally on hardware you control. AI Passport becomes the permission layer between that private local context and the cloud models and internet services you choose to use.

Our North Star is the Egoist Machine: an intelligent system whose memory, incentives and actions are governed by the individual it represents.

YC batch: Summer 2026
Founded: 2026
Team size: 2
Location: San Francisco
Country: US
Status: Active
Industry: Consumer
Stage: Early
Tags: Hardware, Personalization, Privacy, Consumer Products, AI Assistant
YC partner: Harshita Arora

Founders

Erin McGurk — Founder/CEO

Co-founder & CEO of Egoist Machines (YC S26). Grew 0 to 1M+ followers in a year (@erinmerylstudy) and scaled a social enterprise reaching millions. Advised Cambridge and the UK Government on social media strategy. BA (Uni of Cambridge), Land Economy (Economics + Law). Focused on privacy, and social + legal infrastructure.

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David Khachaturov — Founder/CTO

Founder at Egoist Machines (YC S26). BA/MA (Uni of Cambridge), MSc (Uni of Oxford), PhD (Uni of Cambridge) in Computer Science. Youngest-ever Fellow at St Catharine's College, Cambridge at 25. Previously ML Researcher at OpenAI (PaperBench), Lead AI Security Researcher at FrontierOne. Founded and scaled mazette! (game publisher, 10-title portfolio). Cambridge CS supervisor for 8+ courses, taught 160+ supervision groups and mentored 19 dissertations.