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Burt

Easily fine tune and deploy specialized models

We help teams train and deploy models specialized for their domain and use cases. Generalist, proprietary models are impressive and have their place but at production scale and usage you need your AI agents to be powered by models that are specialists. Models you own, trained on your data, that can continuously improve for your use cases. We've helped teams build small, specialized LLMs/VLMs that outperform SOTA models like gemini-3-flash/pro while being 10x faster and cheaper.
Active Founders
Kurt Sharma
Kurt Sharma
Founder
Co-Founder & CTO at Burt Studied EECS at UC Berkeley. Previously @ Replo (YC S21) building high-throughput data pipelines and sandboxed code manipulation systems. Now helping teams build specialized models.
Bobby Zhong
Bobby Zhong
Founder
Co-Founder & CEO at Burt Studied CS at UCI before dropping to join Pirros (YC W23) as their 2nd engineer. Then joined Replo (YC S21) to build coding agents and wrangle LLMs. Now helping teams build specialized models
Company Launches
Burt - Train and Deploy Specialized Models
See original launch post

We're Bobby and Kurt, co-founders of Burt (W26).

TL;DR

We help teams train and deploy specialized models that outperform general, closed source alternatives while being 10x faster and cheaper.

If you’re building AI agents and you have LLM calls that are either too slow, too expensive, or just not good enough, let’s talk!

https://youtu.be/QFXP32moQy4

The Problem

As good as general, closed source models are, they just aren’t built for your use case.

  • The fastest models are unreliable or still not fast enough
  • Your API costs are spiraling out of control
  • Your agent’s just not producing high quality or reliable enough outputs.
  • You have no control over a core piece of your product, leaving you with random regressions, service disruptions, and annoying rate limits

Our Solution

We help teams train and deploy custom models built specifically for their domain and use case.

We help with every step of the process, from data prep and evals to training and deployment.

Using the latest post-training and inference stack we’ve built in house, we deliver models that outperform SOTA while being a fraction of the cost and latency.

Case Study

For one of our customers (more details coming soon!), they had a model call that saw extremely high volume and had issues with it being too slow even with gemini-3-flash.

To solve that, we built a small vision language model (VLM) that’s ~3x faster (p50) while being MORE accurate than gemini-3-flash/pro.

Now we’re continuing to improve that model and closing that last 10%

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Ready to Specialize?

If you’re building AI agents and either of the following apply, we’d love to help:

  • You have high volume, repetitive LLM calls that you want to significantly reduce cost and latency for
  • The agents you’re building just aren’t achieving the quality or reliability you need

Book a chat here or email us at bobby@trainburt.com

Burt
Batch:Winter 2026
Team Size:2
Status:
Active
Location:San Francisco
Primary Partner:Ankit Gupta