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About
Ali Asaria built Well.ca and then Tulip, the retail software company, before spending about a year on Transformer Lab as a side project with co-founder Tony Salomone. The argument behind it is that serious AI research still runs on a scatter of scripts and notebooks, and that the tooling the large labs build for themselves is not available to anyone else. Transformer Lab puts training, fine-tuning, evaluation and inference behind one dashboard, runs across different hardware, and is designed to keep models and data on the user's own machines. Asaria's stated goal is to let others "build an OpenAI, Anthropic, Tesla-quality research lab." It launched worldwide in February 2026 after being used by research institutes in North America, and has since shipped Primus, which it describes as an autonomous AI researcher. The pre-seed round included Hawktail, Toronto's Ripple Ventures and Kitchener-Waterloo's Garage Capital; the amount was not disclosed. Asaria took the TechTO stage in February 2017 for Tulip Retail.
Backers
Pre-seed round including Hawktail, Ripple Ventures and Garage Capital. The amount was not disclosed; Asaria declined to give a figure.
Quick answers
What is Transformer Lab?
A workspace for AI research that brings training, fine-tuning, evaluation and inference into one dashboard, runs across different hardware, and keeps models and data on the user's own machines.
Who founded Transformer Lab?
Ali Asaria and Tony Salomone, in 2024. Asaria previously founded Well.ca and Tulip.
Who has invested in Transformer Lab?
A pre-seed round including Hawktail, Ripple Ventures and Garage Capital. The size of the round has not been disclosed.
What is Primus?
Transformer Lab's autonomous research agent, which the company describes as hypothesising, reading and running experiments on its own.