A Real-World AI Experiment
We are a team of researchers building AI that learns from the world — not from synthetic data, but from real conversations in real businesses.
Two Beliefs on the Future
Everything we build is grounded in two long-term convictions about how intelligence and human-computer interaction will evolve.
First: voice is the most natural interface a machine can offer. Humans are born communicators. We spoke to each other long before we learned to type. Voice isn't a futuristic novelty — it's a return to the most human form of exchange. Satya Nadella called it plainly: “Human language is the new UI layer.” Bill Gates described it as computing's long-standing “Holy Grail.” We agree — and we'd add that voice alone isn't enough. A conversation is more than audio: it requires intelligence, empathy, and theory of mind on the other end. The medium and the mind have to work together.
Second: AI earns real intelligence through real-world experience. Training on human-written data has taken AI remarkably far — but it has limits. As David Silver and Richard Sutton argued in Welcome to the Era of Experience (2025), “a new generation of agents will acquire superhuman capabilities by learning predominantly from experience” — from agents acting in environments and learning from what actually happens, not just from what humans have already written down.
These two beliefs point in the same direction: build voice AI that learns by talking to real people, in real situations, over and over — and gets meaningfully better with every interaction.
The Restaurant as Our Laboratory
These two insights lead to a practical question: where do you start? You need a domain that is high-frequency, low-risk, and rich with human complexity — somewhere a mistake won't cause harm, but where the interactions are real enough to matter.
Restaurant ordering fits perfectly. Thousands of calls per day. Customers who are distracted, in a hurry, switching languages mid-sentence, asking for modifications that aren't on the menu. It is a demanding environment for an AI — and a safe one for learning.
We are not building a restaurant software company. We are using the restaurant as a living laboratory to teach AI how to safely navigate a real business transaction: understand intent, handle edge cases, confirm with the customer, and close the loop.
What we learn there feeds directly into higher-stakes domains. Our founding team has deep roots in healthcare AI safety. The rigor we developed for clinical environments — the compliance protocols, the edge-case handling, the human-in-the-loop escalation logic — applies to every domain we enter. And every lesson from the restaurant reinforces what we bring back to healthcare.
Why “Enkira”?
Our name encapsulates the relationship between deep intelligence and illuminated action.
Enki
The Architect
The Sumerian God of Wisdom and Creation. Enki represents the deep intelligence that understands the structure of the world — the logic of business, the patterns of human behavior, the “code” beneath every interaction.
Ra
The Illuminator
The Egyptian God of the Sun. Ra represents clarity, voice, and the human experience. Once the intelligence is built, Ra makes it accessible — a natural conversation instead of a black box.
Enkira is the union of the Architect and the Illuminator.
We use the wisdom of experience to illuminate what machines can become.
Where We Are Today
We are early. We are building, testing, and learning. We don't have all the answers yet — and we think that honesty matters more than a polished pitch deck.
What we do have is a clear thesis, a team with hard-won expertise in AI safety and voice systems, and a conviction that the most important AI breakthroughs will happen in the messy, unpredictable real world — not in a controlled benchmark.
That is why we build.